Jake was the solo pastor of Grace Church. Although Jake did not have much use for the local ministerial association, he found himself attending its meetings most months. He felt the same kind of nagging obligation to attend that many of his parishioners likely felt on Sunday mornings. And there was, he had to admit, a certain relief in going to a meeting where no one expected him to be the holiest person in the room. He got so weary of always being the one asked to pray before meals, as if he were any closer to God.

Jake was on his guard, even at the ministerial association meetings, to act like a minister should. That desire to keep up appearances disturbed him, especially as he drove home from this month's meeting. The guest speaker, Anna Colma, had talked about the private life of the minister. Jake had expected her to talk about temptations, about the dangers of child molesters and others who abuse their calling. Instead she talked about the loneliness and the weariness pastors feel - and the anger too. She reported the findings of a recent survey of ministers five years after they leave seminary. One in five have already suffered burn-out. 80% believe there is undue pressure on their families. 70% sleep less than seven hours a night. 50% report that they have a close friend. Another survey found that 37% of all Protestant ministers believed that they had themselves "engaged in sexual behavior inappropriate for a minister." The pressure of ministry caused many of the pastors she had interviewed to focus on the petty and irrelevant because the big issues overwhelmed them.

The pastors found themselves over-committed, she said, but they continued to be driven by a guilty sense that they were not doing enough. It bothered him that she gave names to feelings that had nagged at him; he squirmed when she described situations that sounded all too familiar: meals interrupted by the phone, an oddly-uncontrollable addiction to busyness. He wanted (like most folks, he reasoned) to be successful, but he knew she was right when she said that his conflicting expectations - and those of his congregation - made effectiveness too ill-defined to measure and success impossible therefore to attain. He valued both congregational growth and congregational harmony; but he found that when he achieved one, the other waned.

He felt a sincere burden to care for his congregation, but would never want to neglect his family. He resented, for example, that last Saturday he had to choose where he would fail. He simply could not be at the soccer field at 10 o'clock when his son Josh's game began, not if he was going to be at the hospital when Alma Owen went into surgery. Alma had no family but Josh had only one dad.

Why do I always feel like I'm stuck in a no-win situation, Jake wailed silently as he drove along. No sooner had the anger surfaced then he scolded himself for being too negative. "Like your problems are any worse than any other ministers'," he thought to himself, "and they're doing just fine." He knew he was feeling contradictory emotions. When he counseled his parishioners, he encouraged them to examine their feelings rather than hiding from them.

Yet he could not bring himself to follow his own advice. "Just try a little harder, be more disciplined," he often thought, "Get up earlier, eat lunch at your desk. You can find a few more minutes each day." He smiled a wry smile.

"Chronic busyness is a spiritual problem," Alma Colma had said, "not an organizational one. There simply is too much need in your congregation for a quick organizational fix. You cannot possibly provide enough care for your congregation. But you are not called to; only God is. Only when you trust God to do the ministry will you lose the burden of responsibility." She talked about prayer and spiritual disciplines - and they felt to him like one more thing to add to a bottomless list. Getting up early to pray about being too busy seemed a bit hypocritical. He knew she was right; he just wasn't sure what to do about it.