This has been a brutally hard month for me. I’m not going to get into the reasons—it wouldn’t serve anyone to do that—but the result, unfortunately, was not that I rose to the occasion. Instead, I relapsed into a pattern of escape behavior.
That’s a distinction I learned last spring from a colleague here in northern Indiana. Talking with a group of fellow pastors and our wives, he noted that we will inevitably have times when we are stressed beyond what we can bear. That’s true of many people these days, but it’s universally true in pastoral ministry—it’s just the nature of the work. When those times come, he told us, we have two choices: withdrawal and escape.