Here’s the final installment of some of the stuff that no one told me about leading a fast paced ministry.
Reruns available here and here.
Now on to the season finale…

#3

You can’t turn it off

Setting: Cantina, a delicious Mexican restaurant in South Charlotte
Occasion: Furtick Weekly Thursday night date night, about 4 weeks ago

Holly: I feel so sorry for you.
Me: Why?
Holly: Because you have such a hyperactive little mind. And you can’t ever turn it off.
Me: I know.

These comments came after about an hour of me telling Holly at a rate of about 3 million words a minute all about the 4000 different things we need to be doing better at Elevation, and the 4000 things I need to be doing better as a pastor, plus the 4000 new goals we’re going to accomplish in the next month.

When I signed up to be a pastor, I was fully prepared to work hard.
But I didn’t understand that even when my body wasn’t working hard, my mind and my spirit would be.

See, passionate pastors are OCD. And usually ADD. And did I mention they’re often perfectionists?
I’ll tell you why.

We prepare sermons every week that we claim are messages from God.
How much time should you invest in that? 5 hours? 10 hours? 20? 40? 80?
And when is a sermon really done?
Long after the commentaries and concordances are back on the shelf for the day and you’re lying in bed at night, you’re still tweaking point #2, sub point b.
Because you want to make the sermon even better than the best it can be. After all, you’re speaking on behalf of Jesus. And souls are at stake.

Furthermore, you’ll stand before the Lord one day and give an account for how you led the people that He entrusted to your care. How you managed the gifts of the leaders He gave you to lead. And how relentlessly and effectively you communicated and pursued the vision He placed in your heart.
You don’t ever really clock out or take a vacation from that.

Not to mention that spiritual leaders are the target of the most diabolical tactics of the enemy.
That’s enough to keep anyone awake at night.

There’s nothing 9 to 5 about ministry.
And you know what?
I wouldn’t have it any other way!
I wouldn’t want to have a calling that I could compartmentalize.

I’d much rather deal with the challenges of a job that consumes every part of my life than a job that is slowly singing my dreams back to sleep because I’m grossly under challenged and utterly unmotivated.

Elevation, seeing you become all that God created you to be will always keep my RPMs in the red zone.
Don’t worry. I’m not going to cheat my family on your behalf. And I’m going to do my best to maintain a reasonable pace, physically and emotionally.

But the 24/7/365 pursuit of a revolutionary move of God in our city will keep me in perpetual overdrive.
My brain will always hemorrhage with the next idea and a better way to do it.

That’s just the way it is…