I remember a weekend where my pastor-father spent Saturday morning preaching the funeral of a long-time church member and close friend, then spent the evening officiating the wedding of a young couple who had been faithful in the church through their youth years, but in between, he made it to yet another one of my ball games.\u00a0\u00a0On Sunday morning he preached on the power of the Gospel, then spent part of the afternoon counseling a couple seeking a divorce.\u00a0\u00a0Later that evening he sat in his easy chair at the parsonage, put on a record, and listened to \u201cNobody knows the trouble I\u2019ve seen, Glory Hallelujah . . . Sometimes I\u2019m up, sometimes I\u2019m down, Glory Hallelujah!\u201d Sometimes I wondered how he survived the highs and lows of ministry.\u00a0\u00a0Now you understand why I asked God to please not call me to be a pastor, but as always, I added \u201cnevertheless\u201d to my prayer request.\u00a0\u00a0After serving two churches as Pastor, three Universities as campus minister, one mission board as a national consultant, a Seminary as professor for twenty-two years, and twenty-seven churches as Interim Pastor, I finally understand how.\u00a0 \u201cThis is my work, and I can do it only because Christ\u2019s mighty energy\u00a0is\u00a0at\u00a0work\u00a0within me\u201d (Colossians 1:29, LB).\u00a0Call it the \u201dhighs and lows of ministry\u201d or the agony and ecstasy of ministry, but I recently experienced both.\u00a0 I preached the funeral for a long-time friend of five decades, and three days later accepted the ministry challenge of serving as Administrative Connsultant for the Valley Baptist Education Center in Harlingen, Texas. \u00a0In between, I visited with some long-time friends, and made a few new ones. I\u2019m not as spiritual as my dad was, so I did not end the week singing, \u201cNobody knows the trouble I\u2019ve seen, Glory Hallelujah!\u201d but I did recall an old Chubby Checker song that said, \u201cRound and around and an up and down we go.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I remember a weekend where my pastor-father spent Saturday morning preaching the funeral of a long-time church member and close friend, then spent the evening officiating the wedding of a young couple who had been faithful in the church through their youth years, but in between, he made it to yet another one of my…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3108,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3107\/revisions\/3108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}