Receiving (and sometimes missing) grace

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own relationship with God and about how hard it is sometimes to give it a lot of thought or consideration because God is what I do for a living. I don’t intend for that last sentence to sound irreverent, but being a pastor sometimes makes it hard to spend time focusing on your own faith, on your own walk with Christ. And even saying my God is what I do for a living misconstrues the truth and misleads. It’s a weird vocation in that who you are is all mixed up and can get all confused with what you do. If I weren’t a pastor, I’d still read my Bible, but I wouldn’t see sermon outlines in every passage I read (not that I do this all the time but it does happen). If I weren’t a pastor, I’d still pray, but I wouldn’t be leading a whole congregation in prayer each week. Being a pastor means blurring indistinguishably the line between the personal and professional or vocational.

Ironically, sometimes all that goes along with being a pastor can have the effect of crowding out consistent prayer time and Bible study. The very thing I want to teach others to do, I struggle to get done myself. Again, the language of “do” intrudes. The word “be” is much better. But I can’t teach others to be something I myself am not. I can’t pass on habits, spiritual or otherwise, that I don’t myself practice. I worry about this – I worry about how my own failures and weaknesses affect my congregation and how perfect I need to be to be the pastor they need me to be.

Underlying this sometimes, and in some ways, is a failure to grasp grace. Core to the good news is that God comes to us—forgives, redeems, reveals, makes new, and heals—without any effort on our part. We don’t deserve this. He doesn’t have to extend this grace, but grace—and love—are his character (as are holiness, mercy, goodness, justice and many other attributes). He passes on salvation not as a prize for good behaviour but out of an overflowing of good will toward his creatures.

I admit I don’t get grace well enough—that is, while I understand it theologically and biblically and intellectually, many of my attitudes, reactions, moods, and ways of thinking have not yet been sufficiently transformed (converted!) by the reality of this grace, by the reality of who God is. And who he is for us.

I hope admitting such a thing isn’t too startling in coming from a pastor. All I know is that when I look at myself, I see so much need for spiritual transformation. I can discern endless cracks in the walls, leaks in the plumbing, and drafts coming in from the outside.

One of the things I don’t like about being a pastor is that I spend a lot of time not being transparent. That is, most of the time around folks in my congregation it isn’t appropriate to admit to my own struggles and weaknesses and flaws. This is true even if one of my struggles is particularly dogging me at the moment. Finding a place where one can be spiritually open with all the messiness found in even a pastor’s heart is not easy. Companions are not easy to locate. Or maybe I’m not very good at recognizing them when they’re standing right in front of me. Maybe part of me feels I have to be closed off even to people outside the church who could be potential spiritual companions.

Even when posting on this blog, I’ve been quite cautious about the degree of my openness and how personal and direct I allow myself to be—it’s not an anonymous blog and people I know, including some from my church, read it (once in awhile anyway!). Exercising discretion in disclosing personal matters is something every pastor learns quickly.

Part of me wonders (and is still very much figuring out) how a pastor is supposed to relate to his congregation—what he should be and what they would like him to be and what he ought to be could very well be three different things! Though doubtless there is at least some overlap.

Whatever the relationship, certainly grace plays a central role. For even if the pastor does disclose a personal struggle (though not one damaging to his authority or credibility or the well-being of the church; that is, not serious moral failure) that startles some or is simply unexpected in its honesty, hopefully people will still see the pastor as pastor even if the cracks and flaws are more clearly seen. Certainly that is how I hope my people see me—and it’s how I hope they see one another: though broken, God-made; though flawed, redeemed; and though struggling with sin, rescued from its slavery. Seeing one another through the eyes of grace means seeing one another as God does—means relating to one another how God does. We don’t (hopefully!) expect moral perfection of ourselves; and neither should we expect it of those around us.

My prayer for the coming year—though not a steadfast New Year’s Resolution—is that I can learn to rest more comfortably in God’s grace and that I will be, in my attitudes and actions, more transformed by this same grace. I wonder how much our church lives—our journeys of faith and relationships with God—would change if only we had a deeper grasp of not only grace but of the God who in mercy continually extends it in our direction.