When the Hurricane Comes

A friend of mine in Children’s Ministry seems like she can’t catch a break. She lost a staff member about 3 Months ago who was offered a director position at another church, then another staff member was looking for full time work, and wanted to leave ministry. Then just this past week a campus pastor at her church became disassociated with the denomination and is launching a competing church. Two more of her staff members are good friends with him, and are therefore resigning and moving churches. All but one staff member seemed apologetic for changing vocations. Of her two remaining staff: one is a rock star, and one desires to be, but has been peppered with health issues for the last 6 months. So my friend is feeling the crazy: in a few months going for a full staff to about 40%. All the while the church she reports to is also feeling drama and the senior leadership is trying its best, but is also feeling a crunch. The church is located in an area where Hurricane Harvey just dumped 1 trillion gallons of water.

When my friend and I talked on the phone, I tried hard not to seem like Pollyanna. I hope and believe that things will work out well; for her in ministry. She is talented and dedicated. But in ministry, storms happen. Sometime they are isolated squalls, but some time the skies open and just keep dumping on you. I would usually make a reference to excrement at this time, but it is a ministry blog, so I will keep it PG.

The only advice I can give in unyielding fecal storms is to keep going. I know it is a blatant rip off of Churchill and his WWII quote “if you are going through hell, keep going” but it’s a great quote. However, I don’t like that it does not give any real advise to my friend in ministry , so I will end with this quote from the fictional character Mark Watney played by Matt Damon in the movie The Marian. (The movie is good, but the book is better) “At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”