just thinking...

It’s cloudy and overcast in Colorado today and we’re waiting for a big storm to roll in. I’m leaving work for a Wednesday night of peace and quiet with no plans, and hopefully, no urgent phone calls for my husband. He has a basketball game tonight and our son has youth group. That leaves me with my favorite candle burning, my favorite music playing (a mix of Snow Patrol, Coldplay, Vega 4, Keane and Muse)… and the bills which have needed to be paid for a couple of days now. My house is clean from the Bible study last night, and although I have laundry that needs to be done, it can wait until tomorrow…I still have one pair of socks left, I think.

It seems that, when I’m not stupid-busy, I spend a lot of time analyzing the relationships in my life: how they unfolded, what they look like, what they feel like, where they stand. Sometimes it’s easy to see and sometimes it isn’t. That can be a problem with life in the fishbowl- heck, with life in general. Sometimes you just don’t know. Sometimes, with the peripheral relationships in my life (the people that introduce me as “the pastor’s wife”) I’ll think things are fine, that I just had a normal conversation, and then suddenly… they are mad about the nuance of something I said or the fact that my forehead was wrinkled when I said it. It just seems magnified through the glass of the fishbowl. It gets old.

As for my more intimate relationships, I have a pretty good handle on most of them. I do have close friends… girl friends. But I can’t talk to them about church stuff… because it’s usually about someone in the congregation- and it just isn’t appropriate or fair- I don’t want to be responsible for altering their view of someone. If you haven’t been in the ministry, it’s hard to understand the need for such extreme privacy as you protect your congregation.

And heaven forbid that I should have a problem with my husband and need to talk to someone about it. Sometimes I feel like half of the people in our church think we are perfect and the other half are watching like hawks as they wait for us to fall. It’s a scary place to be.

Then there are those that are such fanatic supporters of us that you fear they are following a man and God has been left out of the mix altogether. Does it take a fall to wake them up?

And there are the things I can’t ever tell anyone- all that human stuff- things I shouldn’t think or feel or rely on… stuff that would hurt people. Of course I talk to my husband, but often after a day of working together, we just want to let those things lie quietly and pretend to be normal for a little while… whatever that is.

I guess if you never had someone you could share everything with, you don’t know enough to miss it. I know enough to miss it.

As time passes, my role is becoming more natural, I guess… and then sometimes I feel like I’m just plain acting. This past 3 ½ years have probably been the loneliest of my life because I don’t feel free to share or connect on a human level the way I was able to do before I was “THE PASTOR’S WIFE”. And I feel watched. And I feel stressed that I’m going to say or do the wrong thing. I know this all seems very narcissistic- but hey, this is my blog. I’m just trying to figure things out here. My life has changed dramatically and I wonder if I’ll ever get to the point where I can do what’s expected of me with all of the grace and love that I’m supposed to have? I don’t think I’ve ever tried so hard for so long. (Seriously, couldn’t I at least be burning calories with this effort?)

On the upside, I’ve never had a closer relationship with Christ. Even though he was silent for what seemed like a long time during this journey, I eventually came out on the other side and heard his voice again and things are back in their right place. I know this is the relationship that is the most important and that he is guiding my hesitant steps.