In the long run, I contribute to the church most by being a man with a good marriage and a reasonably healthy family.
—Ben Patterson
You might call it cruising or hanging out. In my family we call it “oozing”: nothing in particular to do, everything in general, whenever we feel like it, if we do. It’s the polar opposite of the way the rest of our lives are lived.
Some people complain when they have nothing to do. We rejoice. With G. K. Chesterton, we never have enough of nothing to do. The Pattersons love to ooze. We hoard like hidden treasure those days when we can just watch television, start reading but never finish four or five books and a dozen magazines, walk aimlessly around town, or talk and drink coffee till we’re giddy with caffeine.
Recently my wife, Lauretta, went to visit her family in Minnesota for a week. She took along our daughter, Mary, and left the boys and me to fend for ourselves. So, we oozed for the whole week, consuming junk food and renting videos every day. I even cleared my afternoons; every day after school, I welcomed my boys at the door.
The church, however, also anticipated our week of bachelorhood. We received numerous dinner invitations, as the ladies of our church looked to mother us with their chicken dinners. It was a wonderful gesture; I guess they thought we’d starve. But micro-waved burritos and pepperoni pizza sounded just fine to us. So as tactfully as I could, I refused their generosity, explaining vaguely that we had other plans—plans to ooze with the guys!
Juggling church, family, and personal time is a nagging source of tension for pastors. Our culture organizes around the weekend, but weekends for the minister are work days. On top of that, our weekdays don’t end at five o’clock. So the lines between ministry and family time are constantly crossed.
I often come to the end of my week feeling like a quarter miler gasping for breath at the end of a race. The debt is not for oxygen in my body but for oxygen in my soul: ooze time with the ones I love. And as an introvert I feel acutely the crunch on my alone time. There are times when ministry seems interminable.
Over the years, though, I’ve made some progress at keeping these areas in balance. Here are some insights that help me do that.
Know Your Signals of Imbalance
Balancing these areas begins with reading the signals of overload. We all have them.
For instance, the bathroom scale often tips me off. I envy the people who, under stress, lose their appetite. For me, though, it’s just the opposite. Weight gain is a good indicator that I’m under stress and that my life is out of control.
Anger is another signal. Sudden explosions toward my family broadcast to me that I’m under pressure.
Still another is when the kids start resenting my instructions. If my discipline is reasonable, and they become annoyed with me anyway, that’s a clue my family misses their dad.
Feeling that my family is just another thing I have to do is another yellow light. When I am so tired and harassed that I approach what ought to be ooze time as a chore, I know something has gone wrong.
So, when one or more of these signals get my attention, I know it’s time to put my life in better balance.
Keep the Sabbath Free from Necessity
More than anything else, for me a healthy and balanced life is the product of keeping a regular Sabbath. By stopping for a day, the Sabbath sets every activity and responsibility back in its proper place.
My childhood Sundays were consumed with nonstop church meetings. As a youth minister and pastor, I kept up that wearying tradition. Imagine my surprise and delight, then, upon discovering a Jewish rabbi, Abraham Heschel, who actually felt thrilled about the Sabbath. His book. The Sabbath, is about a love affair with the seventh day. To Heschel, it is a gift to cherish, a joy to be anticipated rather than a day to endure.
For pastors, a day off during the week is typically packed with domestic obligations. In the early years of our marriage, my day off consisted of “to do” lists—mowing the lawn, running errands, or changing the oil. It didn’t feel like Heschel’s delightful Sabbath, a season of refreshment and joy.
But once a week, pastors need a Sabbath, a day free from necessity. Today, the Patterson rule of thumb is “If it needs to be done, don’t.” Whatever day it is, the Sabbath must be rid of all household chores and “to do” lists.
Lauretta and I both became convinced we needed a day where we stopped everything. So we suspended our obsession to produce for one day a week, transforming our days off into seasons of refreshment with our Lord.
Mondays are now occasions for feeding our souls. An open-ended day allows for a fresh anticipation of God. Our Sabbath actually starts, however, on Sunday evening, similar to the Jewish notion of sundown to sundown. We usually hang out all evening, making popcorn and viewing the tube. We don’t even urge the kids to study. By Sunday evening, the season for homework is past.
Many of our Sabbath mornings start by eating out for breakfast, and we often combine it with a long walk outdoors. Escaping from the house distracts our minds from the “to do” lists; it allows us to reconnect with each other and with God. The temptation to violate our Sabbaths with busyness, however, is always enticing. But now, whenever I am so tempted, I take an aspirin and lay down until it goes away.
A Sabbath free from necessity, though, brought a new tension into our marriage. Lauretta began saying, “Well, when are you going to mow the lawn?” So we shuffled the lists to other time slots, cramming the lawn mowing, errand running, and oil changing into the other six days. Frankly, though, some things just don’t get done now. And that’s okay—much of the time.
A routine Sabbath is the quickest exit off the fast lane. In my opinion, Sabbaths and balance are inseparable. By stopping for one day a week, our lives rejuvenate, reconnecting family ties and titillating our desire for God once again.
Choosing Activities That Refresh
Lauretta calls it a moral and spiritual blind spot: my taste in movies hovers somewhere around Homer Simpson and Archie Bunker. I like macho movies. I’ll take Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Glover over Kathryn Hepburn and Laurence Olivier anytime. And when I hunker down with a bag of popcorn and the unambiguous world of a Schwarzenegger video, my world becomes tolerable again. For me, leading a balanced life demands that I embrace activities that refresh me. And watching Arnold hammer the bad guys while tossing out silly quips in heavy Austrian accents sweeps out the cob webs, letting me escape for a while.
Exercise is also an upper. I usually work weights several times a week and jog as my knee allows. Walking and running really nourish my soul; they’re almost like a spiritual discipline; it’s alone time.
Working out, however, is also a family hobby. A couple times a week, my boys and I pump iron at the ymca. They love it, but it just about kills me. My goal is to bench press 300 pounds (like my friend Arnold?) before I turn 50, but the old gray stallion just ain’t what he used to be.
Reading also revitalizes me. A friend of mine talks about the difference between micro- and macro-preparation. Micro-preparation is the reading done specifically for a sermon or lesson, merely keeping the wolves away from the door. Macro-preparation, on the other hand, is the reading that has no immediate application. Earl Palmer, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, calls it offensive reading. (I’ve discovered, though, that in the long run, the material amassed in macro-reading usually ends up in a sermon or lesson anyway.)
Macro-preparation, whether it’s reading novels or watching movies, rounds out both my personal life and ministry. In fact, I measure a good week by whether or not I’ve been able to give half a day to reading something fun or interesting.
Appreciating Your Limitations
The multitudinous hats worn by the pastor often contribute to the drudgery of ministry. It’s simply impossible to do everything well. So part of being a balanced pastor is an astute self-awareness, an appreciation of your limits.
Take church administration. Please. I’m nearly 49 years old and still haven’t become the crack manager I imagined in my youth I would one day become if I just read enough books about it and tried a little harder. But I don’t mind. I accept what time and experience have demonstrated I manifestly am not. I’ve said to myself. Don’t lose any sleep or knock yourself out over it; it’s just not worth it. I no longer see myself as administratively handicapped, but rather, “differently empowered.” Now if I can just get up the courage to say that to the people in my congregation …
I try to concentrate on what I do well. And that unclutters my calendar while maximizing what I do best. One thing that has stuck with me from the administrative books I read in my hopeful youth was a Peter Drucker maxim for the effective executive: we should determine the one or two things that only we can give to the organization, give it, and delegate everything else. That has reinforced my resolve to consolidate my energies into preaching, teaching, and personal discipleship.
It’s important that I know not only what but how much I can do well in a given month. Sometimes, no matter how much I love something, I just have to say no. Speaking engagements are the hardest for me to turn down. I love the challenge of a new audience and the opportunity to significantly impact people for the kingdom. And I also love to write. But permitting only a few of my outside loves helps me keep my equilibrium.
That holds especially true as I juggle my various church responsibilities. After a month at my present church, I published my priorities in a church newsletter: My number one priority is to pray and to study. Other critical ministries like working with the staff and the church board, and developing leadership fall second on my list. And everything else follows as time allows.
The size of our church staff, I realize, grants me that kind of flexibility. But every pastor faces opportunity costs and ultimately has to make the hard choices.
Give the Church the Fruits of a Healthy Life
The fruits of my walk with Christ and my walk with Lauretta and the children are not easily measured or clearly defined. But modeling a balanced life may be the strongest leadership I can give to a church. In the long run, I contribute to the church most by being a man with a good marriage and a reasonably healthy family.
Lauretta and the kids covet my quantity, not quality, time. For the most part, all those time management pointers are worthless.
I know one busy man who regularly scheduled quality time with his family. One evening after dinner, before he headed off to a meeting, he wanted to shoot baskets with his son. When his son seemed hesitant, the father said, “Come on, let’s spend some quality time together.” The son replied, “Dad, couldn’t we sometimes just have some quantity time together?”
I simply have to be with my family, quality or not. The amount of intimacy with my wife or family is directly related to the time spent with them.
So I find that special moments with my family cannot be orchestrated; I must regularly be accessible to them during unscheduled times. Recently, one of my sons interrupted while I was watching the evening news. He just sort of plopped down beside me on the couch and started a dialogue—about sex no less.
That peek into his life was a priceless moment. A thousand years and lifetimes couldn’t have programmed it. But had I not been available, the opportunity would have vanished forever.
That’s why the oozing routine of the week when Lauretta and Mary visited Minnesota was so wonderful. It allotted me large chunks of uninterrupted time with my boys. (Although, we now try not to be too excited when Lauretta goes away for the weekend—we’d sure hate for her to think we actually preferred microwaved burritos and pizza to chicken dinners.)
That’s also why extended vacations are so important to us. In fact, carving out vacation time is as critical as keeping a weekly Sabbath. Our busy schedules create satellite relationships within the family; we encounter one another now and then but only in passing. We lose our relational contact.
Vacations, though, change all that. The car, tent, or whatever throws our family back together—whether we want to or not. The first two days or so of a Patterson vacation can be pretty rough, with the kids snarling at each other for invasions of private space and Lauretta and me snarling at them for snarling. But quickly we re-learn what it means to be a family, making room again for each other’s world. Hours of together time on vacations overhaul our entire family system.
Vacationing near our immediate families, like Lauretta’s parents in Minnesota, also allows us extra family time. Grandma’s tender loving care always alleviates our daily maintenance concerns, freeing up mom and dad for a more relaxing vacation.
Finally, I can’t underestimate the value of spending time together in prayer with my wife, although it’s taken us years to learn to do it.
Some time ago, a ruptured disc in my spine put me flat on my back for six weeks. Depression settled over me and fear over Lauretta. With two small children and an uncertain recovery, Lauretta and I felt totally helpless.
Up to that juncture, we had never regularly prayed together. I’m not sure why, perhaps because of my own prayerlessness—if I wasn’t praying on my own, why should I want to pray with her?
One night, we began praying together for my back. One thing led to another, and our praying spilled over into other areas.
That particular crisis forced both of us to our knees, intertwining our spiritual lives. The pain of those dismal weeks changed us forever, intimately drawing us together with our Lord. And today, our prayer time is one of the most important parts of each day.
For the church, the time spent with my family never reaches the point of diminishing returns. I don’t believe it’s selfish for wanting more time with Lauretta, my kids, or even myself. I saw a wonderful title on a book, something like. If You Don’t Find Time to Do It Right, When Are You Going to Find Time to Do It Over? Not only is there no glory in ministry burnout, trashing my family and personal life, it’s just not practical.
I have accepted it as a regretable fact of ministry: there will probably always be a dissatisfaction with the balance between job and home. I resonate with the observation of another minister who also feels the pull: “I can feel good about my involvement at the church, or I can feel good about my involvement at home. I don’t know if I have ever felt good about both of them at the same time.” It’s that tension again.
But the Sabbath allows me to place the whole matter, at least weekly, into the hands of a gracious and providential God.
Copyright © 1991 by Christianity Today
