Pastors: Don’t just do something – sit there!
As pastors, we are busy people. Just about every pastor I know regularly works more than 40 hours a week, has evening meetings most nights, and has back-to-back appointments throughout the day. Pastors commiserate with each other about our hectic schedules, but at the same time we consider our crazy hours to be evidence of the importance of our work and our level of dedication to it.
I suspect, though, that pastors and parishioners would both be better off if pastors spent less time doing and more time reflecting. Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and other well-known leaders recognized the importance of “sitting for ideas,” as Dan Miller notes in his blog. Click here to read it, and let me know what you think.
We also have the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42) to remind us that it is more important to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen than to be busy with many tasks. When we take the time to do so, we may discover that God is calling us to reorder our priorities, and that spending time praying and reflecting on our lives, journaling, vacationing, or otherwise pausing from our responsibilities long enough to ask why we do what we do, is actually our most important task.
