I wrestled in an earlier post with issues of time and busyness. I’m still wrestling with it. I think I’m making progress this time… maybe. Becky and I have talked about things quite a lot. She’s supportive (no suprise there) of my desires to get the schedule cleaned off and getting my time priorities changed, and she’ll help keep reminding me so that I don’t just forget about it after a while and drift back to the same old way of doing things.
My “ideal situation” right now is still what I mentioned before: I’d like to just dump everything church-related for a while and see how my schedule settles out. Then I could slowly put it back together the right way, and see how much time I have to do church-related things.
Let me reiterate here that I’m not trying to get out of church responsibilities; I just need to act on what I’ve recognized: that the church can make do without me for a while, but my family can’t.
I don’t think my “ideal situation” is going to happen - it’s just not fair to everybody at church. I think there’d be too many hard feelings and misunderstandings to make it comfortable to continue attending if I just totally dropped my responsibilities there. So I need to find a tolerable compromise. One has suggested itself here recently that just might work.
I’ve put these plans of abdication on hold for a week or two since I promised my pastor (who is also a good friend and has really been my mentor for the past several years) that I wouldn’t make a decision without discussing it with him again, and he’s on a well-deserved vacation to Florida until the end of this week. We discussed it on the phone back before he left; he expressed his desire to talk it over so he could give me some “objective” advice. I laughed out loud. I hope I didn’t offend him. Good advice he will have in abundance. Objective? Not for a minute. He has a stake in this as well; if I dropped everything musically at the church it would have a big impact on Sunday worship services. I know it sounds conceited, but, sadly, it’s true.
What I need to hear him say is this: “I don’t want you to leave things totally. I think there are ways you can reduce your responsibilities without dropping everything. But, if you think it’s what God is calling you to do, then I will support you on that.” I think I will hear it, but I haven’t heard it yet.
I will be continuing to pray for God’s leading in this area. I need wisdom. And Lord, if You want to just send a couple good worship leaders to Noelridge, that would be fine with me, too. :-)