Not indespensible

Jason Byassee wonders why so many ministers feel the need to be in touch all the time:

I can understand why some professions would cause one to need to be accessible 100 percent of the time: firefighters, psychologists with mentally ill patients and (given recent floods in this part of the country) plumbers come to mind. But why pastors? Certainly on large church staffs it's a venerable practice to have one of the pastors on-call at all times in case of emergency. But I worry when I see wired pastors, ubiquitous as they are at church conventions and gatherings of clergy. I fear they conflate importance with accessibility, as if being incommunicado even briefly will lead to spiritual crisis. Must we be like other professions—doctors or financiers—and have a loop around our ear at all times? Or does pastoral wiring suggest anew the loss of confidence of the clergy vocation?

Good questions. Mr. Byassee, by the way, doesn't merely complain; he offers an alternative worth reading about.

Along similar lines, Jim Martin has learned that he is very expendable:

If life is about meeting everyone else's expectations, then I can begin to feel far too essential. In fact, I can begin to feel so overloaded and burdened that there is no longer any joy in day-to-day living. It is one thing to recognize one's vocation/calling and to live as a servant. It is quite another to define my existence by my ability or inability to measure up to the expectations of others. At some point, I need to wrestle with these expectations and take a hard look at which ones really seem to matter, which ones have been thrust upon me, and which ones I have gravitated toward out of my own insecurity.

Amen.