Psalm 23:1-3a
Well, they’ve finally done it. After years of extensive research, a panel of so-called experts has developed the profile of the “perfect pastor.” You may want to grab a pencil and paper and take notes!
Perfect pastors preach exactly fifteen minutes. They condemn sin in their sermons, but never embarrass anybody. They work from 8:00am till midnight, and also serve as church janitors. They make $60 a week, wear good clothes, drive new cars, and give $50 a week to the poor. Perfect pastors are typically twenty-eight years old and have been preaching for 25 years. They are wonderfully gentle and good-looking, love to work with teenagers, and spend countless hours with senior citizens. Perfect pastors make fifteen calls daily on parishioners, shut-ins, and hospital patients, and are always in the office when needed.
Perfect pastors proclaim eternal truths to people who would rather hear the latest baseball scores. They teach, though they must solicit their own classes. They are managers, administrators, correspondents, and keepers of official records. Perfect pastors are sometimes lawyers, often social workers, and frequently one-person rescue squads. They are writers, speech makers, editors, scholars, philosophers, entertainers, salespersons and arbiters. Between all their other responsibilities, perfect pastors manage to write sermons and deliver them every Sunday – sometimes three times every Sunday! – and then manage to smile when someone leaving church says to them, “What a job – you only work one day a week!”
No wonder I’m tired! In case you’re interested, the above information on perfect pastors came to me in the form of a chain letter, which gave these simple instructions: “If your pastor does not measure up to this profile of the perfect pastor, simply send this description to six other churches that are tired of their pastors. Add your name to the bottom of the list. Then bundle up your pastor and send him or her to the church at the top of the list. In one week you will receive 1643 pastors. One of them should be perfect.”
Being a pastor is an interesting and fulfilling job that does have a way of keeping a person busy. But then, all of us stay pretty busy these days, whether we work in or outside the home or are retired. We go about our daily tasks, cleaning house, dealing with difficult bosses or co-workers, answering a child’s question for the tenth time, trying to prepare dinner while we talk on the phone. We work, we eat, we shop, we do aerobics, we mow the lawn and water the flowers, we chauffeur various members of the family or neighbors to all sorts of appointments and activities. We try to be polite to telephone solicitors and slowpokes in the fast lane. We live at an incredibly fast pace, and often wonder at the end of the day where all our time has gone. One office worker, obviously as stressed out as most people are, posted this sign over her desk: “We, the unwilling, led by the unqualified, have been doing the unbelievable for so long with so little, that we now attempt the impossible with nothing.” Another poster in an office declared, “One day I shall burst my buds of calm and blossom fully into hysteria!”
No matter how much people enjoy their work, it still catches up with us every once in a while, and we get tired and frustrated, what my mother used to call “testy.” I heard someone say, “The hardest thing about making a living is that you have to do it again the next day.”
One of my hobbies is collecting bloopers from magazines, newspapers, even church bulletins. A lot of them seem to be related to work, such as these:
For sale: one executive desk, and one secretarial desk with chains.
Arizona’s fifth largest bank is seeking experienced bankers to stuff a downtown office.
For sale: personal coping machine with paper supply.
What is it that consumes our time every day? I came across these statistics in a little book called Astounding Averages:
We must spend a lot of time eating, because every day of the year Americans consume 90 acres of pizza. In one year’s time, we consume 12.29 pounds of cookies and crackers per person, eat 19 pounds of pasta per person, and eat 3.36 pounds of peanut butter per person.
A typical parent spends 10 hours a day working and commuting to work, and 1.9 hours per day with children.
A typical office worker spends 50 minutes each day trying to locate mislabeled, misfiled or misplaced items. The average secretary burns 88 calories per hour on the job.
A typical male will spend 44 minutes each day arranging his hair and his clothes. (No reliable data was available for women.)
Each of us is exposed to 3,000 advertising messages a day.
Adults laugh an average of 15 times a day, while children laugh an average of 400 times a day.
Most of us spend a lot of time each day on the job, both in the office and at home or on a computer. The American dream only encourages us to stay busier and work harder so that we can get ahead or have it all or point to our lives with pride. We struggle to climb the ladder to the top, only to find more demands and greater expectations and longer hours once we get there. Robert Frost said, “By working faithful eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.” There are workaholics all over America. In fact, being a workaholic has become a badge of success, a virtue, the way to be healthy, wealthy and wise.
What we fail to realize is that we never really make it to the top, because the top is always changing and moving. People continue to feel stressed out, beat up, done in, and overwhelmed. Alvin Toffler, in his book The Third Wave, wrote, “There is a harassed, knife-edged quality to daily life. Nerves are ragged and … tempers are barely under hair-trigger control. Millions of people are terminally fed up.” The truth in his words is proven over and over again every day. A fired worker goes into his former workplace with a gun and opens fire. A traffic jam on a hot day leads people to beat on each other’s cars or even on each other. People drop dead from heart attacks in their 40s and 50s. People suffer from every stress-related disease you can think of: ulcers, migraines, depression, high blood pressure. People are worried and afraid and perpetually worn out; they are so busy working that they forget what it is they are working for.
And into that kind of world the Psalm speaks: “He maketh me to lie down.” I know something about being made to lie down. When I was first diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome in October, I spent about three weeks doing little except sleep. And I was knocked for a loop over the weekend by some kind of virus. Sometimes our bodies force us to lie down and rest. When we stay too busy, work too hard, and burn that candle at both ends while we hold a match under the middle, sooner or later it catches up with us.
I think we all need to be reminded that we have to take the time to lie down and rest, before we are made to lie down. What does it mean to lie down and rest? For me, it isn’t necessarily literally lying down in bed. Sometimes it comes in the cool of a summer evening, when I sit on the patio in the backyard with no agenda, no to-do list, and just listen. I hear a few cars and voices, but when I listen harder I can hear the wind in the tree branches, insects buzzing close by, my own breathing, my neighbor watering his garden, a child’s laughter, a mother’s reprimand. I “lie down” when I spend time at the beach, listening to the roar of the waves reminding me that I am not as big and important as I think I am. I “lie down” when I spend time with friends, laughing, sharing a meal or a hug, listening and being listened to. I “lie down” when I listen to music or play the piano or guitar.
What would be your version of lying down? Maybe it’s having time with your children or grandchildren or having a real conversation with your spouse. Maybe it’s taking time to read a book, or write or telephone an old friend. Perhaps it’s making a place in your schedule to read the Bible or pray. I don’t know what it means for you. I just know that we all need to find time or make time to lie down and rest.
We may think that everybody depends on us, that the world revolves around us, or that nothing will get done if we don’t do it. We may believe that no one can get along without our giving 100% of our time and energy and attention, but that’s just not the case. None of us is that important! And remember, even God took one day to rest. That’s why God knows so well how much we need time to rest, too.
I’d like to close by reading a paraphrase of Psalm 23 written by man named James Taylor (no, not the singer), a man looking back at his own life:
God has walked with me; I could ask nothing more. God has given me green meadows to laugh in, clear streams to think beside, untrodden paths to explore. When I thought the world rested on my shoulders, God put things into perspective. When I lashed out at an unfair world, God calmed me down. When I drifted into harmful ways, God straightened me out. God was with me all the way. I do not know what lies ahead, but I am not afraid. I know you will be with me. Even in death, I will not despair. You will comfort and support me. Though my eye dims and my mind dulls, you will continue to care about me. Your touch will soothe the tension in my temples; my fears will fade away. I am content. In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with me. All through life, I have found goodness in people. When life ends, I expect to be gathered into the ultimate goodness of God.
