"You'll have extra time on your hands to catch up on things," they said. "You'll be able to slow down and finally finish that project you've been wanting to work on," they said. "Think of all the loose ends you'll be able to tie up during this period of lockdown," they said. They were obviously never in ministry.
Last Friday at 16:00, I was taking my kids down to their mom's apartment. It's close to where I live and as I drove down the main street, my mind was completely dazed and my body jittery from that dangerous cocktail of adrenaline and exhaustion. "Papa, it was red!" I heard my kids cry out in unison from the back seat. I'd just run a red light, at a snail's pace and with no other cars around, but a red all the same. Then I tried to parallel park the car in a space big enough to land a jumbo jet and missed the mark by a country mile. At this point, the jitters and rising emotions that had been bubbling under all day, came crashing down on me like breaking waves. I slowly turned the corner, pulled into an open parking space, turned off the ignition, and was brought to a screeching halt (metaphorically, of course) by the realisation that I hadn't taken a sabbath in 2 weeks.
One of the greatest fallacies of this COVID-19-era lockdown has been the illusion that we'd have all this extra time on our hands now that we didn't have to commute and be stuck in meetings. This may have been the case for the first week or so, but it is certainly not the case now. [side note: I wish owned stock in Zoom]
I wear many hats. I am also a 7 on the Enneagram and a RED-BLUE on the SDI. Translation: my plate gets very full and I like to plough through the stuff on said plate whilst being my God-created, extroverted self. But ministry during COVID-19 is different because our fibre-optic highways of information have given the tyranny of the urgent an extra measure of immediacy. There is already an inexhaustible amount of information on COVID-19 and I am responsible for some of it from previous blog posts and even this one you're reading right now. This post, though, is not for clicks or keeping up with the Joneses. The message—which I'm getting to— is important to heed. I tend to steer clear of most of the news stuff and get a daily synopsis from my wife each morning over breakfast. I thought this would be enough to keep me semi-sane but what I hadn't banked on was the truly unrelenting amount of texts, emails, and assorted chunks of information that started finding it's way into WhatsApp and one of the four email addresses I use/manage. The exigence of it all is compounded by the fact that people in ministry always feel compelled to be "on." A kind of dogged need to respond at all times like some Mr. Incredible-type superhero (no capes!).
The other side of this coin is the drive to do stuff. "We need to make sure the sheep are ok," we mutter. "We need to make sure adequate resources are available," we reason. We need to ____________ (insert reason) or who knows what might happen," we justify. Yes, the advancement of the kingdom is important, but God said, "Be still and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10) He did not say, "Be busy and run yourself ragged and know that I am God." Here's my point: Guard your sabbath! I am not trying minimise what some people are going through. I have friends who cannot sleep because they are making financial decisions that affect thousands of lives. I have other friends who are on the receiving end of those decisions. It breaks my heart, truly! Sooner or later all of us are going to be, depending on what phase of lockdown we're on (in France we just started week 4), hit with a debilitating sense of helplessness and our knee-jerk reaction will be do, do, do. We'll be churning out excess amounts of information to our people, or Zoom calling everyone we know to check up on them, or going from YouTube/podcast teaching to teaching and down the Internet rabbit hole.
Ministry friends, God is slowing all of us down. We tend to—at least I do—say this a lot to people right now, but it also needs to be self-prescriptive. God doesn't need us to sort this all out. He simply wants us to pause and whisper into our ear. If God is not speaking in the vortex of cyberspace and smart phone pings, it's not because he has a speaking problem, it's because we have a listening problem. Blaise Pascal put it well, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I am not saying stop everything you are doing. The church is rapidly growing beyond bricks and mortar at this time and the Gospel is reaching places it could never have if it was "business as usual." Praise God! What I am saying is we need to be guided by the Holy Spirit as opposed to being reactive to the world's timeline. Not our will, but his be done.
When I finally got my kids (safely) to their mom's, I drove home and turned my phone off. For that evening and all the following Saturday, I didn't check texts or emails. The break really helped me to re-centre and re-calibrate. I implore you to do the same on a weekly basis. We have a long road ahead of us. Who knows how many more weeks of lockdown we have left. We may feel like we have a lot of work to do now, but the greater work starts in the post-COVID-19 world. Life will never be the same again after this so we have a choice. When the world needs questions answered and the church needs to be the church, we can either come out the other side of this weary and bleary-eyed or we can come out ready to be the witnesses God has called us to be.