In my opinion, blogging equals venting. Sure, it can also be a place where people get a glimpse into one's creative outlet. It's also a glimpse to people who really want to read what's going on...welcome to my mind and experiences from yesterday.
I've changed my days off to Mondays. Wednesdays were not working. It would be the middle of the week and I would have 10 million things to do still-never really tuned out and get to do the things I wanted to do, like walk/drive aimlessly and take pictures. I couldn't tune out by entering the world of Zelda or Mario, or maybe to put my soccer skills to test against the computer. Ironic, a Pastor wanting to tune out.
In seminary, the professor was very strict on the days off, but also encouraged us to not take Mondays off. Here's why and the main reason to my post today (I wanted to give you a glimpse in a span of 15 minutes the things that I was reminded of):
On Mondays, especially if you just preached the previous day you're mind is going through all kinds of scenarios that happened from 11AM-12:15pm. While preaching..."Why was that person frowning when I was making this point?" "Why do they always sleep? Am I boring?" "Why do they come if they consistently sleep?" "Maybe that was too harsh, but that's God's truth." "I could have used a different illustration.""I'm moving around too much." "They're looking right at me, but their mind is on something else." "She comes, how come her husband's not there." After the sermon the comments pitched while we shake hands and say Good Morning, "Please try to keep it short." I thought 25 mins was short. "Next time you have to work on your power point." Um...that's the first time I've seen you in church. I've had power points every time. "You're yelling too much, you're going to have a heart attack." Some of the positive yet ironic ones: "Good sermon." (Funny, I thought you were sleeping.) "Great sermon, the part I really liked was..." long awkward pause the part about... (Funny, didn't mention anything about that.)
But the real positive ones: "It's a good thing you didn't do a power point, it would have distracted us. Your sermon was very linear. You built up to this one big point (homiletics: that's called big idea!). I liked that." "You're right-what's He worth to us? What are we willing to do to show that?!" I'll stop here-pride is lurking at the door.
The day after a Sunday if it's not filled with things to do-to keep the mind distracted, then it will enter this black hole of: I should have said this, made a point to say hello to this person, did the sermon challenge them, is it registering on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, why wasn't so and so there, I hope that person comes again, are they looking at the Bible or Facebook, surfing the web, what are people truly thinking about when I said that in my sermon...
Some may find this post uncomfortable. Not my intention. Just a glimpse--there's more, this was the G-rated version. Some think that pastors just work an hour. Yes, it took me an hour to put together a sermon that has all kinds of background to the text, put illustrations at key places, thought of key questions to challenge you, created an outlined that flowed (made sense), typed 4 pages single spaced in an hr (sorry sarcasm). It's been said that the 1 hr of church equals an 8 hr work day for a pastor. So here's to tuning out. I wish I was out amongst those trees with a nice wide-angle lens on my camera. Not enough time to get up there. So here's to a book, TV, organizing home office, Trader Joe's and Costco, and most likely what April 15th's sermon will be like. Cause let's be honest-I can't really tune out.
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