The closest I have come to drowning was a day when we were surfing the south side of Margaret River. It was 4-6ft, onshore and messy, then out of the blue came this sneaker set that must have been 8ft and caught us all inside. It took me down several times and I lost my bearings for a while, until I finished up just washing across the reef and eventually catching my breath and limping in. This week Phil suggested to me that grief is like copping a sneaker set on the head. So this poem kinda taps into that experience.
Grief is a 3 wave hold down.
You can never know for sure
When the demon
Will strike
So you relax, laugh, chat
Let your guard slip
But then…
The moment…
The entire horizon seems to rise
And obscure the sky
You realise
It is NOW
And there is nothing you can do
—
Winding in from the deep
The first monster unleashes its fury
You were not ready
So desperate paddles simply draw you
Closer into its jaws
Where you are devoured
Pummelled mercilessly
Death-rolled by vice like jaws
You flounder breathlessly
Stunned at the ferocity of its impact
Raw adrenalin pushes you to surface
To draw a single gasping breath
—
Only to see a second towering wall of water
Detonate in front of you
Rag-dolling your already jelly limbs
Plunging you once more to the depths
Where it shakes you in its teeth like an angry dog
One of the things I have long despised about the American basketball scene is the way a team is so often defined by a single player.
Think LA Lakers and Le Bron James comes to mind, think Dallas Mavericks and Luka Donkic is the person most likely to personify the team. Games are often advertised as a contest between two superstars rather than as a team contest
To be fair basketball is a sport where one star player can make a significant difference and Luka has often been a picture of that.
But it seems to speak of a posture that is more about the talent and performance of the individual, rather than about the combined effort of the team.
In recent days the Australian Boomers Olympic squad was selected and there were a couple of notable omissions – the most significant being the absence of Matisse Thybulle. It seems Brian Goorjian has been seeking to get the right ‘blend’ of talent, rather choosing talent and then looking for a way to draw the team together. Thybulle was an unfortunate casualty of this approach, so it will be interesting to see if the Goorjian method actually bears fruit.
While I will miss watching the defensive moves of Thybulle, I will say that I admire Goorjian’s courage in seeking to build a star team rather than a team of stars. So far the warm up games seem to have proved his philosophy a winner, but the acid test will be the 3 group games where there simply are no ‘gimmes’. Spain, Greece and Canada will all be very hard games and it will take everything we have got just to make it out of the group, let alone enter medal contention.
It seems Patty Mills has found his shooting touch again which is awesome, Giddey appears very competent in running the point and Jock Landale can hold his own in the centre. With Dyson Daniels, Josh Green and Dante Exum in the squad there is also plenty of depth. So far Duop Reath has seen very little court time, but he’s another who can play a number of positions and be a real threat from both inside and outside
I get the sense that Joe Ingles and Matt Delly may be there for their court leadership and team spirit as much as their actual capacity – not that either are poor players – they are probably just at their last Olympics.
So will we do it? Will we get thru the group – to the quarters – to the semi’s – to a gold medal game?…
I hate to get my hopes up – but I think it’s possible if ‘luck’ runs our way. I reckon it all hangs on getting a good start against Spain – drop that game and it’s all uphill from there…
The other evening as I was chatting with my friend Stu he asked ‘so what’s next for you? Where do you sense God taking you?’
I usually have a pretty clear answer for questions of that kind as I tend to look to the future and see it well. That evening I also had a clear answer – but not one I anticipated. There were two aspects to it:
a) Before Sam died Danelle was excited about studying Clinical Pastoral Education with a view to becoming a hospital chaplain and he died exactly one week before she was to begin her course. So it has been shelved until such time as she is able to pick it up again.
As Danelle and I had conversations around this I sensed that it was time for me to support her in the things she loves and is gifted at. This is her sweet spot – taking people from ‘pain to peace’ is how she describes her calling. So that is part one – wait for her to get to a place where she feels ready to study and then support her in this and whatever roles may come from it. Most of our life she has come alongside whatever I had felt called to and supported. It’s time for her to shine a little more.
b) Stay – I have read a lot about the grief process over the last 4 months and one of the poems that has stayed with me is titled ‘Stay’ from the book Sparrow by Jan Richardson. It’s message is essentially don’t rush past this time – don’t look to ‘move on quickly’ and thereby miss what you may see and gain by staying in it.
It’s a little bit of an odd idea – who ever wants to sit in pain and loss? But her point is strong – wait – stay – and see what comes from that practice. While technically it’s a ‘blessing for ascension day’, it is also a call to those of us who are oriented towards moving quickly thru life to pause and wait. So that will be the second part of my focus – quite simply to ‘stay’ in the space and to see what comes from being here.
I don’t see that as an inactive / passive posture, but more one of learning and listening to what the Spirit may want to say or do and in that space to continue with ‘life as normal’, running our business, speaking occasionally as needed and living in the local community.
So that’s ‘the plan’ – not sure how well I will do at it, but I am happy to give it a shot.
And the poem is below with a brief comment from Richardson:
I wrote this for Ascension Sunday some years ago—in the spring before Gary died, as it turned out. It reminds me how blessings have a way of moving both within and beyond time, spiralling around to meet us anew in the ways we most need but never expected. In these unexpected days, this blessing is for you.
“Stay,” by Jan Richardson
I know how your mind rushes ahead trying to fathom what could follow this. What will you do, where will you go, how will you live?
You will want to outrun the grief. You will want to keep turning toward the horizon, watching for what was lost to come back, to return to you and never leave again.
For now hear me when I say all you need to do is to still yourself is to turn toward one another is to stay.
Wait and see what comes to fill the gaping hole in your chest. Wait with your hands open to receive what could never come except to what is empty and hollow.
You cannot know it now, cannot even imagine what lies ahead, but I tell you the day is coming when breath will fill your lungs as it never has before and with your own ears you will hear words coming to you new and startling. You will dream dreams and you will see the world ablaze with blessing.
I don’t often answer the phone at 8am on a Saturday morning, but it was my brother showing on the caller ID so I figured I’d pick up… However, when I answered, the voice was female – his daughter calling on his phone to let me know he had a cardiac arrest shortly before and was now in an ambulance on the way to hospital. I remembered a few months back when I had last heard this type of voice tone – it didn’t end well. We quickly gathered ourselves and drove down to the Joondalup hospital to see him and the family.
Despite all the best efforts of his wife and the medics, he never regained consciousness. The initial minutes he spent without oxygen destroyed his brain and while the machines kept him breathing for a few days longer he never ‘came back’. At just 57 his life ended… That’s terribly sad and he leaves behind a wife and family who loved him deeply.
So it’s been a rough few months for the Hamilton families. With Steve’s death there is an added weight of grief now to deal with. It is now a ‘muddled grief’ – because the pain of Sam still has us reeling and somehow we now factor in Steve. I don’t really know how you do that – but I guess we are about to find out.
———-
I realised recently that leaving Nth Ireland at 10 years old and coming to Australia with just the 4 of us, I didn’t have the same experiences of ‘family’ as other people did. We had a fairly large extended family in Nth Ireland, and I imagine had we lived there I may have connected with them and they may have been my ‘go to’ for friendship. But over here it was us – just us – the 4 of us and we weren’t a highly connected or emotionally engaged family.
As I reflect on my teen years I remember unconsciously ‘adopting’ friends and older mentors as surrogate family. In our home we rarely engaged in matters of the heart and if we ever did the conversations were usually awkward and clumsy, so we tended to back out quickly into safer territory. As a result the people who helped me address life’s big questions and challenging personal situations came from elsewhere, mostly from within the church community. This was the path I chose from teen years onwards and while the biblical description of church as ‘family’ became very real for me, the experience at home – and with Steve – was more perfunctory.
I have very few memories of the time Steve and I shared as brothers in Nth Ireland – strange – but maybe indicative of how we interacted generally. We did things together – we even shared a double bed for the first 10 years of my life (it was an Irish thing I think…) but we just didn’t experience the kind of intimate connections I have observed in other people’s families. When I think of some of the subjects Sam and I used to discuss I occasionally laugh out loud. I could never talk about that stuff with my dad! As I wonder why this was so difficult in my early years. I’m sure part of it was culture – it just wasn’t the done thing in that era – especially in what I would describe as ‘fundamentalist Baptist’ culture. But a significant part of it was also the relational and emotional coolness that seemed to be so much a part of our family life. We shared a home, but not our hearts.
In our teens Steve and I hung out quite a bit, played basketball together and went on surfing trips and hung out in youth groups, churches and the like. Steve loved the surfing and skating and even shaped a couple of his own boards.
Steve with 2 of the boards he shaped.
In that time I found myself constantly trying to ‘escape’ the home while he was constantly seeking to experience a warmer more engaged familial connection. He wanted, needed and was capable of deeper relationship, but I was finding that type of friendship in other places so I fobbed him off. As the years went on I disappointed him a lot with my lack of energy for our relationship – and his ongoing need to connect only seemed to push me further away. It was strained and confused for most of our adult life and while I slowly learnt what it meant to be a family as I hung with Danelle’s crew, it also served to remind me what a fuzzle my own experience had been. (Yeah I just made up a word there – ‘fuzzle’.)
So Steve and I weren’t very close – even if we were supposed to be. Neither were we estranged. We were just two men with very different life trajectories who happened to be brothers. I imagine this is the case for many sibllings.
What I do recall clearly is that as boys growing up, Steve was the kind, sensitive and generous one. I vividly remember a day when we both had been given bags of lollies. Even though I already had my own bag, Steve asked if I wanted some of his – a very kind and genuine gesture – and I accepted, but with absolutely no intention to reciprocate. In those early years Steve was the kind of person you would hope your kids would turn out to be. Me, not so much…
As well as as being kind and gentle Steve was also very slightly built and emotionally sensitive. He became a target for bullies at school who knew they could get a rise out of him with virtually no consequences. This bullying wounded him and it continued throughout his life in various places. We didn’t know it at the time, but Steve had a condition called Kleinfeldters Syndrome, (meaning he had an extra ‘x’ chromosome) and as a result had fewer male characteristics and did not develop during puberty as other boys did.
As well as having an impact on his physical appearance the condition directly impacted his academic capacity. Steve struggled at school, and left before year 11-12 to pick up a job as a store man for a medical company. Steve loved life and he travelled around the world, bought an old HJ Holden which became his daily driver for a while and also a green mini – which we found one morning on blocks on the front lawn as someone had stolen his wheels.
It was only when he and his first wife attempted to have children that his condition was discovered. Generally speaking men with Kleinfeldters have little to no sperm so he was unable to have children of his own. Shortly after this discovery his wife left and he was single again, but this time with the knowledge of his condition.
I can only imagine how devastating that time was for him. We caught up a little, but I was generally too ambitious and busy to find time for him and people he thought were his own close friends didn’t connect with him as he hoped either. His church didn’t give him the support he was seeking so he made the choice to step away from faith and his church community to find another way to frame his life.
Steve at The Farm
Steve wanted and expected genuine connection with people and he sought to give this himself, but few were able to be what he needed. Each time he expressed his disappointment with me I would step further away, only ever exacerbating the problem. As a soft-hearted, gentle person he took a bruising in that time and as a result he hardened up.
Steve developed coping mechanisms for the relational disappointment he experienced. Over time he became more angular and quick to bite. Whereas previously he had absorbed whatever hostility had come his way, now he was snapping back. It didn’t sit well on him and I wondered what the young Steve would have been like as an adult if he hadn’t copped the knocks. I imagine he would have been a very well formed man – probably someone I would have enjoyed being around.
Steve went back to study as a mature aged student and achieved a degree in Men’s health, a decent effort for a bloke with his academic limitations. However he was unable to find a job in the field so eventually went back to store work and this was his mainstay ever since. His love for wine saw him complete sommelier courses and he worked a second job offering wine tastings in liquor stores. Steve loved his wine and food.
He was committed to looking after his wife and his inherited family and he was doing the best he could. He was a good bloke.
Life didn’t deal Steve a great hand and he had his fair share of struggle. The last few years have been more peaceful between us as we have both settled into the knowledge that we will be connected by family, but its unlikely we will hang out as close friends.
As I reflect back on our 57 years of relationship I do regret that I wasn’t better able to connect with him as he needed. As an alpha male type I tended to seek out and hang with the other A types and that description never fitted Steve. Sadly the immaturity of those early years set a pattern from which we never recovered, despite Steve’s efforts to the contrary.
When Steve died he was probably about as content as I have seen him over the whole course of his life. He was with a woman he loved deeply and who loved him, he inherited a family who he gladly embraced as his own and he had settled into a job that he enjoyed.
When I look at Danelle’s family I see a depth of connection that is quite foreign to me. It took me a long time to engage well with them because I just hadn’t ever seen family in that way. I feel like I have learnt how to be a decent human being largely from the love and consistent teaching of my wife. Over the years my own abrasive edges and sharp tongue have mellowed as she has taught me better ways to relate. I really wasn’t very good at ‘being human’ for a long time.
The last time I saw Steve was for lunch at a local cafe. He wanted to catch up with Danelle and I after Sam’s death, to check in and see how we were going. We chatted for an hour or so, but nothing about Sam. I wondered if he was just going to pass over this monstrous elephant or if maybe we should raise it. Then red faced and a bit awkward, he asked how we were doing since Sam’s death. I realised he probably wanted to ask this all the time we were there, but it just wasn’t a part of the way we normally engaged. Our ‘rules of engagement’ didn’t generally include heart conversations, but I was so glad he pushed thru. What followed was a genuine and caring conversation as we shared our pain and he quietly listened. It was a good final memory.
Steve surfing Smith’s Beach on his own…
As with Sam, it’s hard to imagine that he will never be around again – that my only sibling in the world has died and that any possibility of a more significant relationship has ended. There’s a genuine sadness there that I feel now as an older, ‘second half of life’ man that wasn’t there in my younger self absorbed days.
Steve’s was a genuinely good guy, who struggled bravely through life and who brought a lot of love to his own family and he will be missed by all of us.
(Photo credit to Ben Chipper – an old mate of Steve’s)
I’m an introvert by nature so most of my processing is done internally before it ever sees the light of day. When I cycle, surf or go to the gym I am very conscious that my mind is partially on what I am doing, but there is another ‘script’ running in the background – and it’s using up a lot of resource. I’m less reserved around close friends. I freely speak whatever is going on, but I rarely unload a ‘full dump’ – not that I don’t want to, or don’t feel permission – I just never seem to have the kind of language on hand to actually give depth of voice to what I am feeling in a particular moment.
This is where poetry has been valuable – I can write a poem in an hour sometimes as words and phrases tumble conveniently into one another – while other times it can be weeks ruminating on some particular aspect of the death / grief experience. I know there is something I want to communicate but it is ‘stuck’ – so I drop it for a while, then late on a Thursday night just before going to bed words and phrases seem to appear in my mind – the tone of what I am feeling deep in my being – words materialise that I had never thought of previously. Perfect potent words that turn a left jab into a crashing left hook.
Death and grief is completely new terrain for me in so many ways. I really haven’t had too much life suffering to deal with, so my tool bag is a bit more loaded on exploring the ‘joys of life’ side – finding purpose, meaning, friendship, love – all the ‘goodies’. I have learnt how to ‘suck the marrow out of life’ to quote ‘Mr Keating’. And that is what I have been good at helping people do. Right now I’m about as far from land as I can imagine and in a very small boat. But I feel like if I’m here then it’s time to learn how to sail. I didn’t intend to be here, no one ever does.
Two things I feel very deeply are
a) This terrible experience is not going to take me / us down. I am not going back to the grog or over-eating, nor am I gonna drop the ball on purpose and vocation. I’m fine with a gentler pace of life – with a large space in which to do whatever gets done when people grieve – but I’m also conscious that the vices of laziness and self indulgence/sensuality will take this opportunity to tap me on the shoulder and let me know they have a better plan…
b) While I couldn’t subscribe to the idea that God manufactured this situation as part of a greater plan, I do believe we can bring good out of life’s excrement. Romans 8:28 says ‘God is able to work all things together for good’ if we follow him and trust his purposes (which is very very different to God ‘orchestrating’ all things for good). I’m up for that- if anyone knows how to bring good from the death of a much loved son then God would be the one with a few ideas. I’m hoping I will learn how to do that.
What does that mean day to day?
I feel like it means allowing people into my life in a significant way as we move thru this rather than when the dust has settled. I have really valued the number of male friends who have sought me out and given me the space to talk and ponder. If nothing else I have been just a bit overwhelmed by the sense of being loved by those around me. That is a beautiful thing.
I like to learn a couple of new things each year – so maybe this year will be around ‘how to live with grief in a healthy way and to learn who I am and how I respond in these places’. It’s not my happy place, but I can’t do much about that. I am here, so I want to figure out how to live with loss in such a way that I become a ‘richer’ more complete person. I’ve read a stack of books on grief – to the point where I have now had enough of the subject itself. I get it – there is no map – it sucks…
I want to keep in touch with those who have been affected by Sam’s life and death – whatever shape that takes. I know there are a number of people really struggling with his death as much as I am at times. They are one of our connections to him and we are a significant connection point for them.
I realise much of that is quite individualistic, but I also know that I simply can’t map a plan for Danelle or Ellie or Cosi. We can support one another, but there is definitely an element of walking alone in this experience. To lose a brother, a lover, a son is all very very different and we each walk a unique path.
What I have observed the last couple of times I have spoken in churches is that 3 people have come up to me after the service to let me know that they also lost sons in their early 20’s. I am realising that the death of a child is perhaps more common than I had ever known. There’s something about looking in the eyes of someone who has been there. After speaking in a small country church a few weeks back, a woman approached me said ‘I know how you feel,’ and i could see from her eyes that she did. She went on to tell me of her son’s death and her journey with grief as she gone thru life.
Makes me wonder how much pain is there in the world that I have simply no idea about?
As I read CS Lewis reflection on grief, he described it as feeling very much like ‘fear’.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
A Grief Observed p 1
I paused a moment there because I wasn’t feeling fear or anything similar (and I tend to agree with Lewis on a lot of stuff). That said, I found it difficult to articulate exactly what I was feeling. Intense grief is like?… I dunno – it’s like nothing I have experienced before…
Three months on and after immersing myself in both the experience of grief and the subject (via many books) I feel like I have a sense of how I would describe it – at this stage anyway…
Back in 2021 Danelle and I did our second ‘lap’ of Australia and this time managed to include Tasmania. While in Hobart we took a drive up the infamously, icy Mt Wellington and it lived up to expectations. It was insanely cold at the top.
My weather app said the temperature at the summit was 3 degrees but because of the ferocity of the wind it felt more like -17. I have no prior experience of -17 degree days, but I remember this day as ferocious – frightening even.
As we left the car, fully rugged up and walked to the lookout we were stunned at how crippling the wind was. It seemed to cut thru every part of our being and even with snow jackets on we could only bear its brunt for a few minutes.
Had we been unable to retreat to the visitor’s centre we would have been frozen within minutes. As I was describing my personal experience of grief to a friend recently this was the image that came to mind – being exposed to a force so terrifying it could tear you apart – but also having a space to retreat to, where you could get your bearings and recover while being present to the experience itself.
The sheer force of grief in the early days of Sam’s death was like the assault we felt on the top of the mountain – raging and destructive, an assault we simply had to experience and endure. I feel like I have moved unconsciously between the ‘outside’ and the ‘visitor’s centre’ – between the full force of grief and from a place of being sheltered from its power. I don’t think I’ve tried to hide or run from it – rather to simply acknowledge that it is there – but also realise I can’t endure its attack indefinitely.
The ‘shelter’ or ‘visitor’s centre’ in my experience have been friends, both from church and community who have come around and genuinely offered support. I have not felt alone in this at all – in fact at times I have felt somewhat overwhelmed with love and kindness. I could probably count 15-20 men who I have varying degrees of contact with who all have made the effort to connect and care. That has been a source of much strength and balm. No toxic masculinity here. And there have been wonderfully good women too – but less in my sphere than Danelle’s.
There are days when I have intentionally chosen to ‘step outside’ into the torment and to reflect purposefully and deeply on what has been lost in Sam’s death. There is so much – father/son friendship, future marriage and grandkids, his thinking and reflections of the world that challenged my own and so much more. In those times the emotion is fierce and while my capacity to stand in that space is limited, it feels important to step into that space from time to time and simply let it ‘assault’ me.
This weekend we are speaking at the Margaret River Baptist Church, a community we had hoped to be working amongst as pastors at this time – but Sam’s death meant we changed plans. We have postponed any pastoral work until such time as we are feeling more up to it. But as we went to book a campsite for the weekend, we spoke briefly of staying at the one we were at on our last visit – where we got the news – and the feeling in the pit of our stomach was definitely not yet. A whole flood of memories and emotions were unleashed just with that one thought. For a moment we were outside in the blasting wind.
As I have lived in this space there have been days at a time where I have felt quite ok – normal even. Plenty of work and exercise has kept me occupied so I haven’t been in ‘mope mode’, but I have also wanted to purposefully sit in the space and allow the experience to form and shape me in some way. I’m sure it will do that whether I like it or not – but I’m hopeful of it having some good outcomes rather than simply being destructive.
So if you don’t like the great man, CS Lewis’ description of immense grief then try mine on for size and see if it fits you better.
It’s been around 10 weeks now since Sam died – which I feel is long enough for the shock to wear off most people and equally long enough for the terrible reality of his absence to settle with us.
I feel like I have moved away from shock (‘can’t believe this happened to us’) to ‘what now?… How do we live in this new reality?’
I find it hard to describe the kind of pain I experience when I contemplate that I will never see him again – in this life. It’s very very ‘black’ – very dark and I get the sense I haven’t ever felt this kinda stuff before so I don’t even know quite how to articulate it.
Is it a deep wound that never fully heals and is hyper-sensitive any time it is touched? Is it an expanding inner darkness that I haven’t begun to comprehend yet? I know these last few days I felt the ‘never-ness’ stronger than before, like it has settled deeper in my being.
I’m grateful Sam wasn’t murdered like the two Aussie surfers in Mexico – I’m grateful he didn’t die a violent death, and I’m grateful that we were able to see him and his body wasn’t lost. In light of what we have seen on the news recently I guess those are things are positives. But he’s still dead.
I now observe how people interact around news of Sam’s death, how it impacts some profoundly and others seem to be unaware or maybe disinterested. I know I have never been amazing at staying in that space of grief with people. I just don’t seem to have that kind of empathy. I can focus and work at it, but I have noticed some people are just very naturally empathetic. I’m not one of those as a general rule, so I have a fair bit of grace for people who seem to not register where we are at in life.
In one sense I feel like the reality has taken hold and we have accepted (what else can you do) our situation, but in the acceptance it’s like we stepped up another level in intensity of grief. It’s a little like the chronic back pain I had a few years back – sometimes you forget it’s there, sometimes you have days when you function fairly normally, but other days it’s a searing pain that you simply can’t get around. It never goes away.
And then come the doubts – what if the whole Christian story is a myth? What if we have been the ones barking up the wrong tree all these years?… Yeah I do have those thoughts from time to time. I feel like I also know how to process them so they don’t spiral me into utter hopelessness. In those moments I reflect on what I already know of God, of Jesus and on my experiences of faith over so many years and it pulls things back into shape fairly quickly. I’m glad for those markers and moments that I can refer back to after around 50 years of following Jesus. I imagine this would be a tougher journey without the track history of God’s faithfulness and goodness to reflect back on.
This Sunday we head to Pingelly to speak to the crew down there. We had literally said ‘goodbye’ to them after a weekend on their church camp, when the call came that Sam was in trouble. So they went home with that knowledge – a fairly awful end to a good weekend. I want to go back and share with them some of how we have been dealing with this stuff – how our faith interacts with an event like this and how I have processed it all. I shared a message like this with the QBC crew a couple of weeks after Sam died, and I don’t intend to use it often. but for this context it will probably be helpful for them. I believe they have been doing some stuff with basic doctrine – so this will be a very stretching exercise in practical theology. How do these doctrines stand up and how do we navigate crises with them. I shared some of my deepest core convictions here a few months back so I will be reflecting on how they interact with this current situation.
Thanks to those who have blessed us with such care and kindness these last few months. The initial ‘assault’ is over and now we are contending with the next stages – an unknown quantity in many ways, but I’ll be reflecting on here as I’m able for those who are keeping in touch.
If we are going to change tack and genuinely invest in a bivocational approach to mission and ministry then a first step would be coming to come to grips with just how stiff and unmalleable our imagination of the pastoral role can be.
It’s an imagination perpetuated by both pastor and church community. When pastors take up a ‘GP’ type role they end up feeling responsible for oversight of the whole church community. This isn’t bad. You can carry oversight responsibility without having to invest time in each activity or area. But wisdom and courage is required to discern where your limited time is best spent.
Note I used the phrase ‘limited time’. Seriously – we sometimes lead like time was an infinite resource, but reality is that even a full time pastor has limited time. You need to decide how many hours you are allocating to your pastoral role and then decide which activities you will need to invest most of your time in. You can’t be all things to all people all of the time.. Sorry – you just can’t… Or you can but you can expect to burn out, and feel angry, beaten up and misunderstood. But you are the one in control of your time, so you really can’t get all gnarly if you overcommit and end up with an overly full calendar.
If a good transition to a bivocational arrangement is going to happen then a conversation needs to be had with the church leaders and church community where there is agreement around the scope of the role. There is no point in a pastor drawing hard boundaries if no-one else is also subscribing to those boundaries. That is just a recipe for conflict. When we started at Quinns Baptist I somehow knew that I had 3 areas I could contribute to effectively – leadership & oversight, teaching and meeting with men. In 2 days of ministry these were going to be my priorities and foci.
What that looked like practically was:
a) allocating time for meeting with leaders both 1:1 and in groups, giving thought to future directions and ideas and addressing any challenges or conflicts that were happening. Mostly big picture & important people stuff.
b) teaching approx 50% of the time. I found I could generate a decent quality sermon if I stuck to this expectation. I would allocate 2-3 hours on a Monday morning for reading and exploration of the ideas, allow it all to percolate over the week and then on Friday morning I would switch off phones, wifi and any potential interruptions and crank out a word for word draft. Sometimes it would be dot pointed, but only if I knew my material well enough. That would take 2-3 hours. Then somewhere over the weekend I’d give it a ‘polish’ and make sure it all flowed. Teaching at blokes groups took very little prep as it was more about forming good questions to get men talking than imparting knowledge and information.
c) meeting with men happened ‘as needed’ and where I saw an opportunity. There was an intentional focus in my mind to spend time with men who were keen to move forward in their discipleship and faith. If you just want to attend church and tick the box then I won’t be chasing you.
Of course there was other stuff to do. I maintained the church website for many years, fielded emails from all the people who were seeking an opportunity to showcase their mission projects, did some marriage prep stuff, crisis meetings with families and other odds and ends – but I very rarely felt guilty or disappointed if the non-core stuff didn’t get done.
And I chose those 3 core activities based on my own gifts, the needs of the church and where I saw that I could make the greatest contribution. I
That’s how I hit it practically and it sounds pretty easy as I write it there. The challenge is that everything takes a long time to do because the time you can invest is more than halved. So if you’re a fast paced ‘go get em’ type then you may well find yourself frustrated that your ideas and plans aren’t being implemented quickly enough.
But then you have to step back and ask how important is it that the mens 4 x 4 club gets up and running asap? Or how critical is it that we establish a playgroup. Most stuff can wait and be done when you have the time – or – even better – it can be (and should be) delegated to people in the church
If you are already bivocational and frustrated then it may be
a) time for a serious conversation with leader and church to define the parameters of your role. That is for those who are feeling overwhelmed
b) for those who are feeling like everything is moving too slow it may be time to meet with a coach / spiritual director to reflect on why you are bothered by this and what is driving a need to ‘get there yesterday’.
I began this post suggesting that our imagination of church is too rigid and unmalleable – that the challenge for people going bivo is to come to a share understanding of what it means so that both pastor and church agree on steps forward. Perhaps a step in the right direction would be to get agreement around what constitutes a valid church community (theologically) and then to ask how many ways that can legitimately be expressed. If other alternatives can be imagined then they may also be worthy of consideration. Not all churches meet on Sundays in dedicated buildings led by theologically trained experts…
Of course there are different approaches to change processes. Some groups need a sharp, full frontal re-direction of their focus. Others need a more gentle approach. While I feel like I’d generally prefer to go softly, reality is that in most changes something needs to be broken, so it may even be better to just rip off the band-aid and get moving on a new direction.
This week it’s my job to speak in church from John 8, a story that opens with what we commonly call ‘the woman caught in adultery’ and is then followed by an almost Monty Python like routine between Jesus and the Pharisees where they argue about his identity.
I’ve spoken numerous times before from this opening story, and have always referred to it by that familiar title ‘woman caught in adultery’, until today as I was preparing and I found myself asking ‘why this title?’ Why not ‘religious leaders caught in self righteousness’? Or as one of my FB friends suggested ‘Patriarchal hypocrisy’?
I think we use the familiar title because this is where the various Bible editors have led us to. It’s the chapter heading in most Bibles and we have just learnt to accept it. Is it possible that there are more men than women on Bible editing teams and this is a male perception of the story? I wonder how a female team may have described this story?
Perhaps we need to change the title of the story, because the focus of John’s narrative is definitely not on the woman’s sin – but on the tactics the Pharisees employed to try and ‘check-mate’ Jesus.
The second question I found myself mulling over as I read the dialogue was ‘why does Jesus engage with these people like he does?‘ Is he not better to just walk away and let them be? Doesn’t he know that this is sheer futility? That you never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it)
The only sensible conclusion I can come to for Jesus’ persistent, unfiltered critique of the Pharisees is that sometimes you just have to go after evil systems and call out those who are perpetuating them. Sometimes gentle, kind persuasion doesn’t work. You have to speak directly to the issue in a way that evokes a response. I remember in the early days of running with the Forge tribe that our critique of the church was at times brutal and abrasive. It was intentionally confronting, because I suspect gentle nudges would not have made a difference. While the systems weren’t ‘evil’ the challenge of changing them required more than a ‘have you considered?…’
I seriously think we would have counselled Jesus to ‘let it go’, but he clearly didn’t think that was the best way of dismantling the broken religious systems of his time. Perhaps there is a time for abandoning tact and simply speaking truth in a confronting way. Of course the challenge is that we are not Jesus and our motives are rarely as pure as his…
