There is no place where pastors feel more guilt than they do about their families. And, not only that, I’m not sure that the family problems we face as pastors are even “fixable.” Maybe they can be better and maybe we can “get Home before the dark,” but the nature of our calling and the attendant pressures of that calling require that we change what can be changed, accept what can’t be changed, have enough wisdom to know the difference…

…and fake the rest.

As I go through the video stuff on the pastor’s family, I’m going to tell you everything I know. There is something to be said about an old guy’s wisdom. I’ve been where most of you are, have tried most of what you’ve tried, and have a pile of bloody T-shirts in my closet.

I’ve screwed it up so many times that I’ve lost count, I’ve had to ask forgiveness so many times that it’s grown easy to ask, and I’ve thought we weren’t going to make it so many times that divorce lawyers were salivating. I’ve done some things right and some things wrong.

But I’m still here. After all, we do worship a gracious and kind God.

I’m still married to and deeply in love with the same woman. I have children and grandchildren who are walking with Christ and, so far, haven’t screwed it up so badly that it was irreparable. So listen to the “old white guy.” I pray that what I say on these videos will prove helpful.

But I feel constrained to say something else here that is so very important.

Your marriage and family are never going to be as good as you want them to be, as your congregation thinks they ought to be, or as good as some of the books tell you they can be. The faster you and I face that fact, the more we can deal with fallen world issues in general and family issues in particular.

I will never write a book on marriage. I will certainly never do one on “The Pastor’s Family.” There are two reasons. First, as I mentioned on the video, Anna could (I don’t think it’s going to happen) finally have it with me and say, “enough is enough,” leave me, and find a nicer and better looking guy. My children could (and I don’t think this is going to happen either) become Buddhists.

The older I get, the less is the chance of that happening. However, one never knows and, frankly, I don’t want a book in print that would provide fodder for the “they’re all hypocrites” bunch.

The far more likely and important reason I’m not doing a book on marriage is because every time there is one by some Christian “expert,” a thousand Christian marriages go down the tube. Things were okay until they read the book and then they realized how bad their marriages were and tried to fix them. In a fallen world, if you get 51%, you file it under “success.” And if you try to get 90%, you’re going to get killed.

But that sounds so bleak. I don’t mean it to be bleak. Marriage is an incredible gift and a soft place, and it can be a microcosm for the macrocosm of what God intends for his people. My family is the most important gift God has given and I’m convinced that I would not have made it this far without them…or them without me. I have a lot of lines in my face, but a great number of them are laugh lines reflecting the joy and pleasure of God’s gift of my family.

Just don’t be unrealistic about it, okay?

Just so you know, I’m going to start a thread in the forums on the subject of “unrealistic expectations”…yours, theirs and mine. If you have anything to add, to correct or to teach, why not join me there?

Last night, I was teaching a course on grace at the seminary and realized that what I was teaching the students was dangerous stuff. Not only that. I realized that if they bought it, lived it and taught it, I was setting them up for a lot of pain and maybe even for some career adjustment…i.e. losing their jobs.

So I gave the students the Allender quote…and talked about being careful not to give too much too soon because they would be of no help to anybody if they had to leave the ministry and go into turnip farming or something.

During the class, we were talking about church discipline and whether or not public confession (beyond the leadership) to the congregation was necessary. One of the students said that he didn’t think so because the maturity level of most congregations was such that they didn’t know how to handle sin biblically and with grace, and so could end up destroying the one who had confessed.

Then during the break, one of the students followed me out to the patio where I was smoking my pipe. I said to him, “Jim (not his name), I’ve been watching your face and your reactions to what I’ve been teaching and you really get it don’t you?”

He laughed and said that he did because he had to for his own sanity. Then he told me a horror story about how he had sinned and how he was disciplined publicly. He told me about how he had gone into a major depression and how shame had defined his life, his relationships and his ministry. He then said, “If I had not discovered God’s grace and how radical it was, I would not have survived.”

It almost goes without saying that mostly the church isn’t very safe for anybody…and especially for pastors. It also goes without saying that it ought to be a goal of a pastor or a leader to try and remedy that. The question is how one gets from here to there without losing one’s job, dividing the church and creating—in the sometimes angry reaction—a church which is less safe than it was before one started?

I don’t have the foggiest.

I suspect Jesus had the problem in spades and it doesn’t hurt to check out what he did. Can you imagine knowing the truth (all of it) and trying to communicate it all the while knowing that we wouldn’t understand and would, in fact, kill you for telling us? Can you imagine living in the light and personifying love when dealing with people like us? Can you imagine what it would be like to come from the throne into “the silent and dark planet” where the residents missed what God was really like? Do you know what it cost to be a friend of sinners and drunks, to consort with prostitutes without sleeping with them, to speak truth to self-righteous power, and to love us when we didn’t deserve it?

Do you remember what Jesus said to Peter who was not altogether happy about Jesus washing his feet? Jesus said, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.” And then Jesus said to his disciples, “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” So it is permissible, I think, to be incremental.

Again, I don’t know how one moves a congregation or a people toward the light of God’s radical grace without losing one’s job. I do know that it’s important to speak truth…even if you can’t speak all of it. I know that it is important to confess your sins…the ones that won’t get you fired. I know it’s important to somehow love self-righteous people without being self-righteous, to be unconditional when others are very conditional with you, to be authentic without being stupid, and to be clear about your own neediness without being a weenie.

And then, I suppose, one has to trust that God will be involved in the process.

One other thing I know is that you have to have some people around you who love you enough to tell you when you’ve sold your soul and rationalized that transaction with the excuse that the congregation wasn’t ready.

So, to use the words of my late friend, Jack Miller, tell your congregations that the Bible is summed up in two sentences: First, cheer up; you are a lot worse than you think you are. And second, cheer up; God’s grace is a lot bigger than you think it is.

Just don’t be too specific until they are ready.

If that subject doesn’t make you wince, you probably need to spend some more time with Jesus. And if you don’t think that politics is necessary in the church, you need to spend some more time with Paul.

I’ll probably say this in the video series but just in case I forget, one of the important spiritual gifts for a pastor to have is a “mean streak.” Well…uh…maybe that’s not the best way to put it. But then again, maybe it’s best to use the harsh ascription and then let the Holy Spirit’s gifting sand it down a bit.

But with that being said, it does worry me sometimes that so many pastors, in their efforts to be kind and Christlike (a good thing), end up being a target for neurotic people whose calling in life is “get the preacher.”

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Ben Haden, but he’s been my friend for a whole lot of years. (Check out “changedlives.com.“) Ben was one of my predecessors at the church on Key Biscayne where I served, the longtime pastor at First Presbyterian in Chattanooga, and a former newspaper editor.

Ben is quite strong in his leadership style. One time he called the church treasurer into his office, locked the door and pocketed the key. “Both of us can’t run this church,” Ben said, “and when this meeting is over, one of us is going to resign.”

It wasn’t Ben.

I must restrain myself from telling you more stories…but you get the idea.

We were talking about leadership once and he told me that the congregation (even if they shouldn’t and even if it was wrong) would think of God the way they think of their pastor. He said that if they could manipulate their pastor, they would think they could manipulate God. “So,” he said, “you have to be strong even if you don’t want to be strong or don’t feel strong.”

I’ve never locked a treasurer in my office (Ben’s meaner than I am), but I have prayed for some deaths. (Joke…sort of.) And I’ve tried to heed—sometimes to varying degrees of success—Ben’s advice about being strong even when I didn’t feel like it.

Inside “the warrior is a child.”

Have you ever been in those revival meetings where the evangelist, in order to get people to come forward at the invitation, did a bit of manipulation? Sometimes the evangelist would say, “Turn to the person next to you and say, ‘If you go, I’ll go with you.’”

While I don’t very much approve of that kind of thing, that’s exactly what God says to his servants, to wit, “If you stand, I’ll stand with you!”

He does, you know?

He said that to me this morning and then told me to tell you.

Don’t you shilly-shally!

I discovered that Thomas Wolfe was half right and half wrong.

I don’t do nostalgia very well and don’t much want to do it well. It’s sort of like going into a bakery when you’re on a diet. Why do it? You can’t eat anything there anyway. I always thought that it was best to wait on nostalgia until retirement or closer to death. Then you can remember. Until then, it’s best to keep moving.

Not only that. We have a “selective” remembering process. We remember the good stuff and filter out the bad, so that the girl one dated in high school looked like Marilyn Monroe, one’s prowess in sports was astounding, and the music and fun never stopped…when in reality, the girlfriend looked like your ugly aunt, you couldn’t make the team, and there was more confusion and pain than music and fun.

But sometimes it’s good to remember. (“Drink this in remembrance of me.”) Sometimes you stop, look back and remember God’s faithfulness. Sometimes you “pile the rocks in the river,” look at the “memorial” and rejoice. Sometimes God gives you accurate memories of the fact that he was there and wrote the story.

That happened to me this weekend.

At the worship service where I preached on Sunday morning, there was a “full house.” No, I wasn’t playing poker. However, that full house was as positive to me as a full house was back in the days when I played poker.

(Oh yes, just so you know, if this preaching thing doesn’t work out, I can always play poker for a living. I was quite good at it, thank you very much. I even thought I might do it for a living and would have if Jesus had let me. He wasn’t altogether happy with my idea.)

No, this was a house full of memories…memories of people I loved and love, of battles we fought, and of the dark places we walked through together. In the front row was a man who almost died of cancer and in his cancer, found God. Behind him was the widow whose husband died in the hospital as I held his hand. There was the couple headed for divorce court when Jesus came and restored their marriage. There were so many who had found Christ at the church where I served for so many years. A bunch of people hugged me and whispered in my ear some memory that we shared of God’s faithfulness. I saw the couple whose son was killed and remembered the tears we shed together, the young man I had baptized who is now serving Christ in some hard places, and the many couples for whom I had “officiated” their weddings. As I looked out over the congregation, I was overwhelmed with memories of supernatural answers to prayer when the doctor had given up, the counselor didn’t know what to do, and friends were without hope.

Okay, okay. There were some twits there too. I haven’t lost my mind or allowed the good memories to cause me to forget those for whom I prayed…that they get the hives!

Do you know what I thought as I drove back to Orlando? I thought that there is no better job on the face of the earth than being a pastor. I know the hard places, the discouragement, the loneliness and the feelings of inadequacy. I have all those T-shirts.

But when I was a pastor, I also had a “front row seat” to the drama of God in the lives of his people. Nobody but pastors get to see so much of God in so many places. We get to go places where nobody else goes, share secrets that nobody else shares, and rejoice in the victories and weep at the failures that nobody else can even imagine. We are called to “walk with Jesus” and to see through his eyes the reality behind the reality of his people.

My poet friend from Dallas, Bruce Fogerty (“The Birdbath Poet”), sent me a great poem the other day.

Grace Masquerading

The darkest hour of some lives
Often yield the big surprise-
Grace masquerading once again
Who would have thunk it; Oh my friend!

Dad…

Grace was there. And as I drove back to Orlando from Miami, I was thankful that I was there too.

Does that make me want to be a pastor again?

Not quite…but almost!

But there was one person who wrote: “Pastors don’t need your website. They need to be faithful with the truth and stop compromising!”

I’m already a Scrooge at Christmas and, frankly, that didn’t help.

Then I thought it could be worse.

I could be a pastor.

Then I thought it could be worse than that.

I could be a pastor and have that man as a member of my church.

Then I thought it could be even worse than that.

I could be a pastor and have to deal with that person and have to do it at Christmas.

Then I thought about you. I stopped and prayed for the pastors I know and for those I’m coming to know through this website.

I’m old…but I remember.

How do you deal with the self-righteousness of twits?

And then at Christmas…

How does one say something that’s been said and heard a million times without boring people out of their gourds? How does one preach and teach God’s people and, at the same time, try and be faithful to present the Gospel to unbelievers who come out of the woodwork at Christmas? How does one say “no” to all the parties without giving offense, “yes” to one’s family when you know there’s no time, and “leave me alone” to people who just want to stop by and chat? How does one meet the budget shortfall at Christmas and still be prophetic?

Then there are the concerts, the “Christmas Weddings,” the staff Christmas party, the officer Christmas dinner at the manse…and it goes on and on.

But the hardest part about being a pastor at Christmas is the pain…the pain of God’s people that no one sees but the pastor. At Christmas, my counseling load often doubled and sometimes more than that.

Loneliness, loss, depression and sometimes even anger (as with the man who wrote me) get magnified during the Christmas season. Christmas is so painful for so many because one’s darkness is even darker when everybody else seems to be living in the light, singing about it and rejoicing over it.

Only the pastor knows.

But there is always Christmas Eve.

That was always my favorite service of the year. By then it was too late to fix what one hadn’t fixed, to contact those one hadn’t contacted, to visit those one had forgotten to visit, and to buy the present or send the card one should have sent.

On Christmas Eve, even this old Scrooge was glad and celebrated the coming of the King. On Christmas Eve, I sang the ancient carols without faking it and felt the love that had come…

…even to me…a cynical, old preacher.

On Christmas Eve, I would pray, “Jesus, you know I wouldn’t do this for anybody but you, but I do thank you for letting me serve you in the hard places. I praise you for the forgiveness, the mercy, the grace, the meaning and the love you have given to me and I rejoice you have commissioned me to bring that to others the way you brought it to all of us at Christmas.”

So cuss and spit, and gut it out at Christmas.

Christmas Eve is coming!

And not only that, a spiritual giant is praying for you.

Jesus.

(And my prayers couldn’t hurt either.)