Today I am sharing over on my friend Jill’s website, about walking through the weariness of ministry life, and what I learned about love and church by refusing to quit….
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. -John 13:34–35 (ESV)
I sat there, across from my husband on our leather sofa, my hands trembling in my lap. I was about to ask the impossible, and I had no idea how he would respond. I was pretty certain his job was undoing my soul.
So I opened my mouth and asked him to quit his job as the lead pastor of our church….
Part of me couldn’t believe we had ended up here. The Weary Pastor’s Wife had always seemed awfully cliche to me. Bedraggled. Resentful. Disconnected from the call to love Christ’s Bride.
I had been determined to avoid this cliche. But I ended up here anyways. I didn’t feel cliche that day, though. I just felt too weary to keep going.
The pain of a thousand moments weighed me down. I had seen all the bad things up close for too long in the lives of the people we loved and served: sickness, death, loss of jobs, infidelity, anger, unforgiveness, betrayals. The cherry on top of this sad sundae was that I felt like a failure because I hadn’t been able to become the woman some people thought I ought to be.
Or maybe I just wasn’t who I thought I ought to be.
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