The Pastor’s Pains and Comforts

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift.” (Mary Oliver)

Pain sits like a sewage that has backed up into our basements or like a river overflowing its banks into our fields and pushing toward our homes.  In such cases, no matter what else we do that day the waters of stench or torrent will have to be dealt with. And yet, maybe these two water analogies don’t quite help us. For they both imply a crisis occasion.

But pain isn’t always a crisis occasion. Sometimes pain is like the air we breath or our arthritic fingers. We learn to open the pickle jar or turn the faucet each day with wince. In other words, as the old adage goes, “Pain is a part of life.” As such, pain forms part of the landscape of pastoral ministry. Pastors enter a life of pains. By this I do not mean that life is only pain. Gladness of soul, simple pleasure, laughters of goodness saturate our days like the steady Spring rains. The flowers bloom.

But the one who has an aversion to pain along with an unwillingness to learn its ways and enter its territories will truly struggle as a pastor. Surely Job’s friends, the older brother, and the clergy who would not do for the beaten man what the Samaritan did, have all testified to this truth. I do not like this fact, but while heaven waits, pain is given parole. Sometimes our weary exhaustion in life and ministry comes solely and simply from the sorrows. (Lk. 22:45) We sorrow over at least two kinds of pains in life and therefore in ministry: “pains for” and “pains from.”

• Pain for our families: “and seeing him he fell at his feet . . .” (Mk. 5:22)
• Pain for our neighbors and churches: “There is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.” (2 Corinthians 11:28)
• Pain for our fellow ministers: “lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow.” (Phil. 2:27)

• Pain from personal sin: “sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” (I Tim. 1:15)
• Pain from limits and unanswered prayers: “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.” (2 Cor. 12:8)
• Pain from our bodies: ” . . . for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.” (I Tim. 5:23)
• Pain from our families: “And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, ‘He is out of his mind.’” (Mk. 3:21)
• Pain from church members: “Alexander the coppersmith did me great harm…” (2 Tim. 4:14)
• Pain from fellow pastors: “Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry.” (Phil. 1:15) “And there arose a sharp disagreement so that they separated from each other.” (Acts 15:39)
• Pain from neighbors: “An attempt was made by both Jews and Gentiles, with their leaders, to mistreat them . . .” (Acts 14:5)

How do we enter a vocation that does not shy away from pain, but learns how to grieve it, to enter it, and to walk with others or at times alone, through it? The man of sorrows invites us to an apprenticeship. In fits and starts, through many toils and snares, with multiple nights prostrate on the floor of our pillowed tears, we learn from Him to say with Paul things like this.

“our bodies had no rest, we were afflicted at every turn, fighting without and fear within–But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us . . .” (2 Cor. 7:5-6)

“At my first defense no one came to stand by me but all deserted me. May it not be charged against them! . . . but the Lord stood by me and strengthened me.” (2 Tim. 4:16)

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of all mercies and the Father of all comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” (2 Cor. 1:3-4)

Dear weary friend. Jesus intends to comfort you in all of these pains for and pains from. The process is sure but not quick. He is your way forward. Do not lose heart. There are gifts in this darkness. Graces in this ruin. A tomb for this cross. A tomb that cannot keep you hemmed in. A tomb from which in Jesus we rise and the bones once broken begin to dance again–the dust in which we once laid. Somehow in prison with chains and stripes on our backs, we enter the story of Paul and we too because of Jesus begin to sing. Who but Jesus can confound pain so thoroughly? Who but Jesus can comfort so truly?

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