The Life of a Itinerant Minister

My apologies for having been absent so long, unfortunately the holiday seasn for clergy seems to have started, and so I am doing 4 funerals a week at the minute.  For the non clergy amongst you that may not sound to bad, its only 4 hours work a week, right?

Not exactly, you see what people don’t see is what goes on behind the scenes, the fly on the wall documentary stuff. Lets take a typical funeral for Joe Bloggs.  The Funeral Director (FD) rings you up on Tuesday to see if you can conduct a service the following Tuesday, its rare to get over a weeks notice except at certain times of the year. So you contact the family and arrange to visit them to gather information for the service, but more importantly to give comfort and support.  The smallest amount of time for a visit is normally an hour, up to maybe two hours at most.  There are exceptions to this, but they are a good average. Then you need to prepare a eulogy, maybe half an hour, a sermon that has some relevance to Joe Bloggs life, and make sure that everything comes together between yourself, the FD and the chapel. Now a sermon has to be an interesting story that ties into both Scripture and a persons life.  You try doing that in under 4 or 5 hours, and yes I do normally try to use a new sermon at each service rather than having a “standard” sermon I use all the time.

Yes, I know the organising is the FD’s work, but its amazing how often families tell part of the details to different people, so when you arrive on the day you discover there is something happening you didn’t know about.

So for each funeral you have an hour for the visit, half an hour for the eulogy, 5 hours for the sermon, an hour for the service, and there you have an 8 hour working day for each service. And then you have all your normal work to do as well.  So yes, being a Minister is a great job because I get to spend time with my family and work from home quite a bit, but sometimes we work overtime to. 

Oh an one of the services this week is partly in German, and I last spoke german 20 years ago at school.

Ecclesiastes 31

 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven: 
 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,  a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace

Imagine you had a bank that at the stroke of midnight paid £86,400 into your account, to do with as you wish, but at the stroke of midnight that money would be deleted and another £86,400 would be paid in.  No overdraft, no balance carried forward, no borrowing against the next days money. What would you do?  Me, I’d spend every penny of it!!

Well, you do have an account like that, its called time.Every day you get 86,400 seconds to use as you will for the day, but any of them that aren’t used at the end of the day are gone. We can live life to the full, or we can waste our lives and God’s gift of life to us.

Today is Shrove Tuesday, a day when we eat pancakes to mark the older tradition of using up goods in the house to prepare for Lent.  Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the start of the 40 days of Lent, and most people give something up for it.  Chocolate, alcohol, sweets are all firm favourites.  We go without them for 40 days and think how good we are, and then stuff ourselves on chocolate on Easter Sunday.

This year I’d like to suggest something different. I’d like you to take something up.  I want you all in Blog land to think of ways of living life to the full, doing the things you would regret if you died tomorrow. Maybe its telling Aunty Mabel you love her, even though you only see her twice a year.  Maybe its spending more time with your family, rather than working yourself to exhaustion.  Maybe its visiting your local church, giving spirituality a chance.  If you live in the Black Country, you may even see me in the church.  God would like us to let him in on our lives, before its too late.

Everything has a time, as the bible verse says, the problem is we don’t know when its our time to die.  Lets make sure we do the things that will make our lives fulfilled so that on the final day, when we stand before God, we don’t think “I wish I’d done that, or said this”