why Sunday is the easiest day of the week

I recognize that it has been a while since I have posted, well over a month. Given the fact that my previous post promised more consistent blogging and this blog represents something far less consistent, I must be forced to admit that I have not yet mastered the idea of blogging. Life has gotten busier, no doubt about that, Josiah learning to walk and talk, not to mention the fact that everyday I am surprised by some new layer of my position. That is what drove me here today.

I find that the easiest day of the week is Sunday...by a landslide. If you are a pastor this might, I guess, make sense, but my guess is most people won't get it. But you see Sunday is neat and tidy. I wake up on a Sunday and...my sermon is written and ready, my partners in ministry prepare the rest of the details, I don't have extra meetings or appointments. I simply wake up, clean up, and stand up and "do what I do." Of course, there is much more that goes into a Sunday, conversing with people, listening to ideas and making decisions on the fly (not something I recommend), meeting new people and hearing people tell me the stories of their lives. By Sunday, I have everything figured out (read a bit of sarcasm). When I stand up on Sunday's my ideas are as clear as they are going to be. When I greet my brothers and sisters, I do as one who wants to welcome them into our community. All of my Sunday stations put me in a position to be clear and hospitable.

Now, enter Monday through Saturday. This is a different story. Monday through Saturday I sit in the mess of life. I don't mean other people's lives, but my life, your life, our life...this thing we call life is messy and I live in it, just as everyone does, I guess, every day of the week. I sit in the mess of life's questions, not just because I am wondering and discovering, but I want to help other people wonder and discover as well. I wrestle with ideas about following Jesus and wonder why I seem to do it with a limp all the time and wonder how I should go about helping people discover a communal life with God (and in writing communal I realized that the word I've used most frequently in this post is I, so apparently I have a long way to go too).

What I mean to say, is that I am realizing that following Jesus well, really well, is all about living in all kinds of tension. Created for purposes we won't fulfill, being a cracked version of who and what I'm supposed to, bent toward doing my own thing than ever wanting to submit to anything, and all the while being remade in the image of God, being restored back to the kind of creature I'm supposed to be. And that makes life messy. (That sounded really trite when I just wrote it, sorry).

Pastoring broken-but-being-fixed people in a broken-but-being-fixed world as a broken-but-being-fixed person myself means that Monday through Saturday I don't have it all figured out. Things don't always happen properly, and I don't always respond with great aplomb (thanks Andy Bernard). So, as a friend of mine is continually saying, we just have to respond to Jesus. Though I am, in some ways, a vision kind of guy, I am finding myself further and further away from a clear picture of preferred futures. But that is the nice thing about being a part of the gospel of the Kingdom of God, the preferred future is already written and the vision is cast. My job in life is to be faithful in moving toward Jesus toward the Kingdom. My second job is to help those I love to do the same thing.

On my wall, I have a picture labeled leadership. The caption says, A leader is...it continues. But I covered it up. It now reads, A leader is TBD. I'm going to keep trying to respond to Jesus. I'll answer the "a leader is" question, when I get to where I'm going...or at least a bit further down the road.