Kerux: a portfolio of Calvin Theological Seminary - Volume 42.1 - 20 Sept 2007

Why Being a Pastor Sucks (or: Why I can’t Imagine Doing Anything Else with my Life)

A Summer Reflection

by Meg Jenista, Senior M.Div. student

The last two weeks of my internship were rough-going. I told my friends that if another person in the congregation got sick, I was quitting. I was joking…mostly.

VBS week may have been the most difficult. Sure, I enjoyed the kids running around the church, running into my office to snitch candy then running down the hall to “spy” on Pastor Meg. It was a secret agent themed VBS and so I was “Agent Meg,” except some of the kids from our church kept blowing my cover saying, “You’re not agent Meg, you’re PASTOR Meg!” Yup, that’s right. You got me, kid.

At the same time, with the backdrop of pattering footsteps and giggles, I was also dealing on the phone with, let’s say, a marriage in crisis. How does a mere mortal human heart hold it all? As a pastor, you don’t get turn-around time. You don’t get a chance to switch gears. The result is a sprained heart and a dislocated brain.

I know that chaplaincy carries its own burdens but, in a way, I’m jealous. Working in a hospital predisposes you to expect human suffering, misery and death. Anything other than that is a tiny break in the clouds through which sunshine descends. Parish pastors live in the gap.

We sit with people in shock over the doctor’s phone call.

We rejoice in the hospital over the birth of a newborn baby.

We weep with the couple who would love nothing more than to hold a newborn baby of their own in their arms.

We instruct teenagers in the faith of their families.

We grieve and we must act when we hear stories of abuse in those aforementioned “faithful families.”

We talk openly about the perils of marriage to a wide-eyed, smoochie-faced couple.

We wonder if the couple on the phone ever imagined it would be them while they were sitting in some pastor’s office years ago.

Pastors are called to the highest highs of human existence. We are also called to the lowest lows of human experience. And the big secret we carry is this: we don’t have any answers. We don’t know why some people get cancer and others don’t. We don’t know why some people get pregnant on accident while others can’t get pregnant no matter what they try. We don’t know how to have faith in the valley of the shadow of death, either. We don’t know and we don’t know and we don’t know.

The strange comfort I found as a rookie pastor is that twenty years of ministry under my belt wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t know. And, at the end of the day, I firmly believe that people don’t need their pastor to know. They just need their pastor to show up. They need the voice of God to somehow show up. And it was the most absurd, most arrogant, most humbling realization of my summer that I’m called to be a witness to God’s presence in moments like these.

I learned to pray more than I ever have before in my twenty-eight years of living. I’ve wanted to cry more than I let myself. I had my first sobbing-ugly-cry-drive-home-from-church experience. Dry-eyed and well-caffeinated, I’m a hazard on the road, let alone when I’m choked by sobs and I can’t breathe. And it is the fact that the sobbing, ugly, crying drive home from work is a necessary part of the calling that is why it sucks to be a pastor. It is also why I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life.