A WEEK IN THE LIFE: SUNDAY

This is the only morning of the whole week I set an alarm, but it’s a doozy, going off at quarter after five. My usual Sunday morning MO involves wandering in a daze out to the living room, then falling asleep (again) to the early-early-early edition of “SportsCenter.” (Hey, I’d love to tell you that I wake up and immediately set to work coming up with a plan to eliminate world hunger, but last I checked, lying was still a sin.)

It was colder than a penguin’s feet in Wisconsin this morning, -3 when I woke up and -8 when I went out to start the Neon. It knows we’re about ready to get rid of it; it barely starts and lets you know it’s unhappy that it’s not yet been put out to pasture.

Part two of my Sunday routine involves a visit to McDonald’s. I’ll only eat breakfast at the Arches, and even then, only on Sunday. There’s just something about the ambience of my office and the nervousness of preaching that makes an Egg McMuffin taste really, really good.

There is no earthly way to predict church attendance by any meaningful measure. People stay away if the weather’s bad, but they also stay away if the weather’s too good. If I could craft a perfect weather scenario for maximal church attendance, it’d be 45 degrees and partly cloudy–cool enough that your dress clothes don’t make you sweat, but not so cold that you have to run from the car like Priest Holmes. -8 and windy is not a weather report that generates much optimism in a pastor’s heart.

Indeed, with ten minutes until our 8:00 service, the pews looked like your grandmother’s teeth right before she got the dentures–lots of gaps everywhere. But then, at the last minute, the people flooded in. We had 20% more people at 8:00 than usual.

My church has two services, one at 8 and one at 10:30, with an education hour in between. So I am time-constrained; the first service can’t really go a minute past 8:55, or parents don’t have time to get their kids to Sunday school on time. I’ve gotten pretty good at hitting that target; I’ve only gone over once in the past year–and that was when we had a guest preacher, so it wasn’t my fault, technically.

This morning first service came in at exactly 53 minutes. It could have been two minutes shorter, since the last two minutes of my sermon weren’t all that great. The service felt a little weird anyway. Our organist was gone this week, off getting married on a beach in Jamaica and thus not experiencing -8. His substitute is the woman he replaced. The congregation is more used to her playing than his–but I’m not. She does just fine, mind you, but the relationship between pastor and organist is like the relationship between center and quarterback, only without the homoerotic overtones. Even if somebody else is just fine, they’re still somebody else. But hey, at least I have the same organist every week–I’ve never had that before.

After shaking hands and grabbing a cup of coffee from the kitchen, I got involved in a micro-counseling session. This happens almost every week, but this week it needed more than five minutes of my time. In fact, I had to request a continuation at a later date–and I was still ten minutes late to Bible class.

Thankfully, the class is understanding. We’re working on Acts, after all, and they’ve had firsthand exposure to the conditions the early church faced. So what’s a little delay for the sake of the Gospel?

By the time Bible class is over, I’ve been “on point” for two uninterrupted hours. That leaves me, in theory, with 30 minutes to reset my head before I have to lead worship again. But theory is theory and reality is reality–there’s usually somebody who needs something from me during that in-between time. This week I got to talking to a couple of our new council members, and by the time I looked up, I had only twelve minutes to go before worship started again.

If you read yesterday’s post, you learned that I don’t preach from a manuscript, only from notes. And I mentioned that the upside to this system is that I’m always preaching in the present moment, instead of reading something I wrote a couple days ago. But there’s a downside, and the downside is that my sermon is always a lot better the second time I preach it than it is the first.

It’s good that it is this way, though. 10:30 is, in many ways, a tougher crowd. 8:00 is morning people–they’re always cheery, mostly because they’re always up at this hour. 10:30 is the crowd that knows if it wasn’t Sunday, they could be home in bed. But they’re a great audience, simply because they’re a little more demanding. I’m free of time pressures as well; everybody who wanted to watch Daytona probably came at 8:00 anyway. So service #2 clocked in at 57 minutes.

Somebody once told me that preaching and leading worship at two services on Sunday morning is an equivalent mental effort to putting in 12 hours at any other job. I’m not too sure about that, but I do know that I’m pretty dopey for the first 3-4 hours of Sunday afternoon. Today my wife and I had a Valentine’s date at our favorite greasy spoon in the next town over. I had trouble deciding what I wanted to eat–not that everything sounded good, it’s just that I didn’t have the mental energy to make a decision.

It’s usually at this point that my wife tells me I look awful and I need to go home and lay down. I always protest that I’m not tired, but she’s always right. However, today I didn’t go right away. Instead, I messed around on the computer for an hour to clear a huge logjam of email, read for a little bit, then tried to lay down and never actually fell asleep. I’m feeling it now, the same dull central headache that reminds me I do actually have to stop from time to time to take care of myself.

In theory, I’m now off-duty until Tuesday morning. But, in practice, I have two meetings and a hospital visit to take care of tomorrow. So I’ll not be recreating too much, not until the middle of the week at least. And maybe not then, either. Like everything else in a pastor’s life, it all depends on which way the Spirit’s blowing tomorrow.