A long pause

I feel terrible about going a whole month without writing anything ... partially cause I know people still check the blog and so I feel bad for not providing new content, but also because it means there is a huge backlog in my mind of things I have meant to be thinking about but keep putting off until I have the time/space for them. Vacation stacked up against Annual Conference, with a week of frantic work in between certainly makes it hard to get all my thoughts out.

One concept that has been going through my head recently is the similarities of pastors and fire fighters. I am currently in the process of training for a marathon (a whole post in its own write). One day while I was running and listening to my iPod a song came on about the firefighters who rushed into the World Trade Center. The song, by Tom Paxton, talks about how these firefighters were rushing up the stairs while everyone else was running down. As I was running to get back into shape, this song reminded me of how much conditioning firefighters must do just to be fit enough to help save other peoples lives. I think pastors need to be in similar shape.

While pastors do not need the same physical conditioning as firefighters, we need a level of spiritual conditioning that rivals them. Like firefighters, I think pastors' lives are a lot of waiting for the bell to go off and us to need to spring into action. We have tasks that keep us busy on a day to day basis, but ultimately we never know when a call will come in that really taxes us. As I work at getting in shape physically it really makes me wonder if I am in enough shape spiritual that I could save a life if needed. I think I could be of help to someone who was maybe in minor distress, but do I have what it takes when something big comes along? To some extent I may never know; until something happens, but I feel like I need to do more to be ready. What am I doing to burn of the spiritual flab as well as the physical stuff? What are you doing to stay in spiritual shape? That is what I get for listening to the Bishop all week before writing this stuff down.