A day in the life

I’m waiting for a video to upload, so I thought I would take a few minutes to jot some stuff down. A couple of pastor friends have shared a meme asking people to share in gif images what they think a pastor’s week looks like. Well, I have been trained for many years of web development to disdain gifs, and I am a pastor. So I thought I would write about what a typical week in my life looks like.

Of course, writing that sentence, in and of itself, is rather amusing. I was called to vocational ministry (i.e., Christian ministry as my livelihood) when I was a freshman in high school. A couple years later, as I was preparing to go to college, my whole class took one of those career aptitude tests. Mine told me I should do several things, but clergy was not one of them. So I dug into the test to figure out why it said I should not be a pastor. I discovered that clergy was rejected as a possible career for me because of my answer to one question: Do you want to do the same things every week? I answered no.

Well, I changed my answer to the question, and clergy promptly shot to the top of the list of things I should do. But here’s the thing: in 15 years of vocational ministry, I’ve never had two weeks come out exactly the same. Sure, there are some rhythms: we’ll have church at set times every week. But no two weeks have ever been the same.

Today is Tuesday. (Well, technically, it’s Wednesday now.) So I’m starting the week a little late, but this is what today looked like:

5:00 am: Alarm snoozed
5:08 am: Alarm shut off
5:30 am: Rolled out of bed, started reading for homework
6:09 am: Good morning, wife!
6:25 am: Good morning, daughter!
6:50 am: Pack lunch for wife (leftover chicken)
7:10 am: Send wife to school
7:20 am: Good morning, son!
7:25 am: Drive daughter to school
7:40 am: Shower
7:55 am: More reading
8:15 am: Drive son to school, protect bus zone (It was cold this morning!)
8:40 am: Stop in school office, discuss KidStrider stuff, deliver paperwork for a new student to her teacher
8:55 am: Call church lady about borrowing impact wrench
9:15 am: Arrive at church lady’s home to borrow impact wrench, visit
10:30 am: Drive to use impact wrench: change a flat tire for another lady in the church
11:15 am: Impact wrench failed. Return home to rethink strategy, gather supplies, print replacement KidStrider cards, eat an apple
11:35 am: Gather gear, drive to school to help with KidStrider program
1:00 pm: Lunch meeting with good friend (Chick-Fil-A!)
2:40 pm: Pick up Thing 1 from school
3:00 pm: Return to flat tire, use blowtorch to heat stuck lugnut
3:30 pm: Lugnut still stuck. Traffic duty at the elementary school
4:00 pm: Return to flat tire with air compressor. Test whether it will hold air long enough to reach tire shop. (Yes!)
5:00 pm: Pick up Thing 2 from school
5:35 pm: More reading
6:30 pm: Supper (tuna and noodle casserole!)
7:00 pm: Friend stops for visit
7:05 pm: Church lady stops by for visit
9:00 pm: Homework
10:35 pm: 15-minute nap
10:50 pm: Homework
2:18 am: Write blog post while waiting for homework to upload (made a video tonight)
2:45 am: Bedtime.

This schedule does not include the numerous phone calls I made, text messages I received, or emails I exchanged. I called people while driving to and from places, and I did the rest in the few minutes between things. (Email all happened about 5:30 pm.) The good news today was that I did get to the office! The bad news is that I spent less than 5 minutes there while printing.

If there is a lesson to be taken from today, it’s that not all “pastoral” work is glorious. Often, the things that should be simple end up being ridiculously hard.

Also, if you find a stray orange traffic cone in the neighborhood, it probably belongs to Samuelson Elementary.