Think of the various experiences in ministry that cause you to be angry. As a beginning, make a list of five of them. You don’t have to show them to anyone, so be very honest. It may be a person whose behavior almost always upsets you. It may be an official board that seems to be more obstructive than supportive in the decisions they make. It may be the denominational pressure that ignores your personal stress but emphasizes the need to raise funds or advance programs they are sponsoring. It may be the myriad of administrative tasks that consume your energy and leave you little time to focus on people or challenging the injustices of the world. Don’t try to cover everything. Just pick the first five that come to mind.
What do you do with the negative feelings generated by such situations. If you blast forth with such feelings, you run rough shod over the very community of faith that you are seeking to build. But if you swallow them, even to the point of denying that they are there, the energy of those emotions will turn against your body and rob you of the vitality of life–physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Both the rise in physical health problems and depression among the clergy is evidence to the cost of not dealing with those feelings in a healthy manner.
I would contend that God knew you and your physical, emotional, and spiritual needs before God called you to ministry. I would further contend that God is not defeated by your limitations as a human but rather can work through them for good purpose. In addition I would suggest that God invites you to employ strategies that can help you not be harmed by repressed feelings.
One of those strategies is to learn to be honest with God even with your most negative feelings through your prayer life. As I have suggested in previous blogs, some of the harsh language of the psalms of lament, psalms which we have every reason to believe Jesus used in his prayer life, provide guidance in how to share our negative feelings with God through prayer.
I will continue to work on this in future blogs.
