In recent years there has been an increasing attention paid to the issue of clergy self-care. I’ve written a lot about this in the Presbytery Pastoral Care Network Newsletter. See our web page at www.pastoralcarenetwork.org . As I was talking to a seminary class about this issue, it occurred to me that there is an essential relationship between self-care and staying in touch with our sense of call.
Many years ago I read Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl and learned a truth that has shaped my life. One of his key points in that book is that if you give a person a why they can endure almost any how but you take away the why and almost any how can become too great a barrier. With respect to ministry, the why is your call by God to this profession. That may have come in a dramatic fashion or it may have simply been a slow dawning awareness that evolved over time. The problem is that over time, with repeated stress and disappointments, one can begin to doubt the authenticity of the call.
It is important to discover a discipline that enables you to revisit that original sense of call on a fairly regular basis. Of course the call can change over time but the key element is to stay in touch with the source of call. You can not read the Bible and be unaware that God’s call often is accompanied with lots of stress, frequent experiences of suffering, and disapointments. It was not the pleasant successes but the belief that it is God who is calling us that gave our ancestors the strength to carry on. It is our call that gives our life experiences meaning. We will talk more about this in future blogs.
