THERE IS A REASON I’M RETIRED {R, 1-20-22]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

 

Knowing I was going to retire at the end of it, Helen started a journal at the beginning of my last year of full-time ministry, in case I forgot what it was like and wanted to go back to work some time. She didn’t get through the whole year. She got busy and forgot about it after a few months. In fact, just this week she discovered it while going through old boxes of stuff that we have moved unopened through several years and places. She just presented it to me, unfinished and 26 years late. This turns out, though, to be the perfect time to read about the way it was.

For, yes, I have recently been tempted. There are so many problems now, and clergy are so overworked and overstressed. It’s impossible to do the ministry tasks during a pandemic in the ways we learned in the past. And people in general are so stressed and depressed.

I figured I could still help out. After all, I am awake for several hours each day, and I can drink coffee while reclining on the sofa as well as I ever could. You can do that on Zoom meetings even better than in-person meetings.

I probably couldn’t do everything a minister must. Like preaching. I can’t wander around the chancel while preaching, the way you’re supposed to these days. I have to stand in the pulpit so that I have something secure to hold onto and lean against. And I’m forgetful, so I might repeat the same sermon over and over.

Reminds me of the preacher who gave the same sermon the first five weeks he was at a new church. The board members went to him. “Do you realize you’re preaching the same sermon every Sunday?” “Yes,” he said, “and when you’ve done what I say in that one, I’ll preach a different one.”

That reminds me [Have you noticed that every story reminds me of another one?] of the preacher giving his retirement remarks at annual conference. “All those years,” he said, rather piously, “I really had but two sermons.” A colleague in the audience whispered, “You mean there was a second one?”

Like that guy, I have only one sermon. I do, however, arrange the stories in a different order. Being old and forgetful, though, I might confuse the order, so, no, probably not preaching.

But counseling is a possibility. Lots of folks, in church and out, are depressed and need counseling. I was never a very good counselor, but you don’t have to be good to be useful. You really just have to listen and act like you’re paying attention. That last part, however, is a problem at my age. If you’re already depressed, it’s not good if the counselor falls asleep as you recount your problems.

As for the other abilities necessary for ministers in these pandemic times: I can’t remember how to mute and unmute on Zoom. I can’t understand what people say if they are masked. I have no patience with stupidity.

More importantly, Helen’s journal reminds me of the way it was. It records various problems and conflicts that followed one another in tumultuous succession, from dawn to midnight, every day, so many that I have only a vague recall of most of them, and of some, no memory at all, and I have a better-than-average memory. Even without a pandemic, the work and stress were constant. I was glad to deal with the work and the stress, then, because I could.

Whenever I have filled in at a church in my retirement years, though, and someone has said, “I wish you were our preacher all the time,” I have replied, “There is a reason I’m retired.” Helen’s journal has reminded me of that reason.

So, I guess the best thing I can do to help the church and the preachers in these pandemic times is just to leave the rest of the pages in Helen’s journal blank. You’re welcome.

John Robert McFarland