TEN

 

 

Ten years, ten months, ten days . . . what would you do if that's what was left to you?

 

It's an old question, I know.  I'm feeling the urgency of it these days.

 

Looking ahead: I'll be sixty in a few weeks.  I figure that gives me ten years of energy at the level to which I've become accustomed.  Not anything approaching the energy I possessed five years ago, but still.  Enough.  Ten years in which to pastor a church and/or accomplish some other things which matter to me.  Ten years before I will perhaps want to make completely different choices about how to spend my days than I do now.

 

(And yes, I'm presuming health, which is nothing more than a fragile hope.  I have a routine colonoscopy scheduled in a couple of weeks.  Once one of those routine tests alters your life for year or more, as a mammogram did for me, you no longer view them with quite the equanimity you once did.  But let's pretend.)

 

Looking back, the last two months have been fuller than I would have liked (and probably account for how sick I've been the last few days).  The usual church stuff plus some difficult conflicts.  Three funerals, a new member, two people having and still facing major surgeries.  (And while I've never had a pastor come to visit me in the hospital, excepting after the birth of my boys nearly twenty-nine years ago, when my people go, I usually do as well.)  Extensive preparations for two major events, one of which I was unable to attend, due to one of the aforesaid funerals.  Three days of advocacy in Washington.  And some unbloggable stuff, some kind of difficult and some filled with promise -- or not.

 

I really am not at all sure how to approach these next ten years.  I feel very . . . scattered.  It's in the nature of parish ministry that one does many things, different things, sequentially and also often simultaneously.    I'm not sure that I want to live that way.  I look at some of the intensity with which others in my boat approach writing, or suicide prevention work, or bereavement work, and I think: Yes, I should be a more single-minded and focused person. 

 

Then I live with that sort of focus for a bit, and I miss the rest.  I loved being in Washington.  I loved the return to my driven lawyer self.  I loved the sense of community.  I loved being with 200 people who could talk about gruesome details of death by suicide without flinching.  (I guess that sounds weird.  But so often I have to sensor my reality . . . ). And yet, while I was there, I was planning worship for the next two Sundays in my head, I was texting with a parishioner with respect to one of those surgeries,  I was the grateful recipient of thanks for some liturgy I had prepared, and I was starting to plan a rather unusual retreat for myself for next winter -- a retreat I might actually need to make right now.  I seem to migrate toward the varied in spite of myself.

 

There is an actual thought forming itself as I write.  Hard to believe, I know.

 

More later.