I started my new job as an associate pastor last Wednesday, and ever since I’ve been very much in a pick-a-fight funk. My poor wife has been undeservingly gracious, even though I’ve been continuosly snippy without cause.
Part of me wonders if this is the satanic opression that comes when you try to stand up do something right. Or perhaps I’m afraid of stepping out again after being hurt in the ministry before and that fear is gnawing at me.
The blanketing feeling that’s smothering me is this overwhelming sense that nothing I do matters; a sort of theistic fatalism if you will. I know, I know, I’ll get a hundred comments to the contrary. But I think there’s something to be said for realized how big everything else is when compared to you. I suppose that’s one of the great comforts of the Christian faith is knowing that we are investing ourselves in something greater than ourselves, that will live on even when we’re gone.
But have you ever felt like we’re on the downward swing and we can’t stop it? Only a fool doesn’t see the pendulum of history as it makes its slow arch. I think about what it must have been like to be emergent–breaking out of intense darkness to let glorious light shine forth. To be a part of the Protestant Reformation, frightening as hellfire but the world was changing for the better.
I feel like we are apples, lying in the sun, fragrant wind blowing, picturesque hillsides. But we are rotting, and there’s nothing to be done. Our foundation is slowly being eroded until we, like the Catholic Church in Luther’s day, kill the men of God because we’ve meandered our way into damnation and can’t tell sinner from saint.
