Sunday School Teaching

Are you a Sunday school teacher? Would you be if you were not married to the pastor? It's that time of year - Sunday school starts up next week at our church and the teacher-recruitment phase is in full swing. We've only been here a year but it looks like gathering teachers does not come easily.

So more than once someone has looked longingly at me and described the openings. No one has asked me exactly, just hoped in my direction that I would volunteer.

I'm not going to.

There is no chance that I will teach on a Sunday morning any time soon because I am a mess about 50% of the time just showing up and listening. Give me any responsibility apart from my kids and I might melt into a heap of crazy again.

I don't say all that to these folks. I just say I don't think I'll be able to do that. Thank you for teaching my children. It means a lot to me. I pray for you and I will say thank you and I will tell you how important your investment of time is for our family. God bless you, teachers.

What's My Responsibility?

A Bible study for moms is meeting at my church this morning and I am not there. It's an established group that meets on a regular schedule and, mostly because I've been sick, I have been only once.

It's a fine group. The study is fine. It's not a group I'd be likely to spend much time with were I not the pastor's wife. And there's the rub: what is my responsibility to the women of our congregation as the pastor's wife?

I am the most widely-known woman in the congregation. Some people assume that, because I am married to the pastor, I am "better" at being a Christian than most. This morning when I dropped my kids off for preschool one of the other moms was teasing me about not going to Bible study this morning. "She's the pastor's wife and she's not going to Bible study?" I replied, in the same light tone, that there is no correlation between being the pastor's wife and being a "good" Christian. She thought that was pretty funny.

It happens that the time during which this group meets is the only time I have to be alone. All my children are at school for only 5 hours each week. I treasure those hours! I'd rather not subtract two of them for a group Bible study.

This situation represents a question I am constantly asking myself. What is my responsibility to the congregation? I appreciate that I have a unique position from which to encourage the women of the church. I want God to use me for that purpose. I also want to take good care of myself; to make choices that sustain me.

What would you do?

3 Things I Try NOT to Say Sunday Morning

1. "My husband says..." If my husband wants someone to know what he thinks, he can tell them.

2. "Sure, I can be on that committee!" The energy of worship and fellowship time can make volunteering for a project seem simple, but it almost never is. Better that I take the time to consider an opportunity before I make a promise. Generally, I think of my role in the church as participatory and supportive rather than leading. My husband leads and organizes a lot and neither the church nor our family needs much more of that from me.

3. "I'm fine." I long for church to be an authentic community. I struggle to be honest, not to vomit the details of my personal life but to be honest when I am miserable or delighted. How can we "rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn" (Romans 12:15) unless we know each other's joys and sorrows?

Backstory

Now that we are in a church where my husband is the only pastor, I am discovering a new burr in my pastor's wife vest: every sermon and every Bible class comes with baggage. I often know what happened this week that inspired the particular angle he takes on the scripture reading. Sometimes he's funny or off-beat and other people think he is so witty and I think I've heard this story/joke a dozen times before.

It's like being at a dinner party where your spouse is amusing and surprising everyone else and it's old hat to you. A dinner party every Sunday morning. He is funny and smart and witty. I'm glad other people appreciate his creativity. But some days I am very aware of the drawbacks to being married to the preacher.

Do any of you pw's have the same feeling?

Comfort

Recently I heard a sermon on this passage from 2 Corinthians:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.

I like that command/promise value pack. God comforts us. He has, he does, he will. He expects us to care about other people who are hurting because we know how they feel and have experienced God's care for us. My understanding of the words "compassion" and "sympathy" is that they involve shared experience. I have compassion for someone who feels lonely, hopeless, or rejected because I have felt those things, too.

I assumed mature Christians would behave this way toward others.

When the conflict with sr pastor outgrew his relationship with Husband and began to involve our parenting decisions, I decided I should talk directly with sr pastor. I was hurt deeply. I felt like he had judged us and felt insecure about being at church.

I carefully, thoughtfully worked out what I wanted to say to him and how to say it in an relationship-building way. I decided to approach him as my pastor, asking for his help finding my place at the church. My imagined worst-case-scenario was that I'd cry and lose control of myself. I tried to remember that authentic tears generate sympathy and connection and that would certainly be good.

Things started out well. I described my frustrations and asked for his help. He offered brief, practiced answers that I suspect he has given often to similar requests. Then I thought aloud, "The last year has not gone the way I'd expected..." and started to cry. It was a profound understatement of how difficult things had been for my family.

This is the moment when I'd have expected 1 Corinthians to kick in. As a pastor -- in theory, my pastor -- I thought he would comfort me with the comfort he had received through Christ.

He didn't.

Instead he picked up the thought and turned it to himself. "Things haven't gone the way I'd expected either! When your husband came I thought..." and he began listing his frustrations with my husband.

I was speechless. What a crazy mess. This pattern repeated over and over in interactions we had with sr pastor. It is so painful, feels so unkind. It also makes me hurt for him because he seems unable to see beyond himself.

This post was inspired by a recent item from the Church Whisperer. "We are surrounded by pain and sorrow and dysfunction and incapacitation. Without something to offer in opposition to that pain, without a heart that breaks for hurting people, our mission fails."

Being the Pastor's Wife

At the seminary, I recall a very conscientious effort to help wives of students develop a sense of community and mutual support. It seemed like a good idea, since we were all in the same oddly-shaped boat. It didn’t work out too well for me, though. I felt always on the outside – not German enough, not pious enough, not sweet enough, not “Lutheran” enough – to fit in. I grew up in another denomination and would still be there, I suppose, except that I love a Lutheran man whom God has called to be a pastor. During those first few years I struggled just to understand and accept the Lutheran interpretation of baptism and communion and to figure out how to use the hymnal.

As the years go on, it is a happy surprise for me that the core of Lutheran doctrine is so liberating, so clear about the nature of my relationship to God in Christ. The more I understand the freer I feel to depend on and grow in relationship with Him.

I still feel like I’m on the outside. The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod seems to have a particular culture and I do not feel like a part of it. When I wind up in groups where everyone else has two degrees of separation from every Lutheran who ever lived, I am lost. My uncle didn’t teach your cousin religion in high school; my grandpa wasn’t the pastor who officiated at your husband’s sister’s wedding.

I am stranded on a bridge: too Lutheran to be anything else, and too uncomfortable with the Lutheran cultural identity I’ve encountered to feel I belong inside of it.

Generally speaking, all of this is ok. Depressive episodes of self-doubt notwithstanding, I like myself. I do not, however, assume that other people will like my particular amalgamation of orthodox and non-traditional, reverent and irreverent, conservative and liberal.

The spiritually wise choice is to let this conflict nudge me deeper in God’s Word and an identity that rests solely on Christ. That sounds simple but it isn’t.

Hurt Feelings

How do you balance hurt feelings with compassion for the jerk who hurt you?

I suppose not calling him a jerk would help.

I am absolutely sure that senior pastor is making decisions that he considers good, responsible, Christian. I am also absolutely sure that, from my perspective, he seems to be a poor manager, self-centered, short-sighted, lacking compassion, and sometimes just mean. "Mean" implies evil intention, which I do not believe he has. I feel like he does.

I want so much to let go of this guy. Why do I care what he does or thinks or feels about Husband or me? Don't I have better things to do? It's like he creeps up on me when I'm trying to ignore him. I've been browsing the book Boundaries by Drs. Cloud and Townsend. They describe healthy boundaries as permeable in a specific way: allowing good to come in, and keeping bad out. I'm sure that trying to make sense of a relationship that has persisted in senselessness qualifies as "bad" that would be better kept out.

Prayer and Consolation

Describing my depression always seems a little beyond my reach. Today I feel like some part of me is empty that really ought to be full. I'm sure someone out there would say "The answer is JESUS!" I suspect it is both that simple and much more complicated.

Earlier this week I had a chance to talk to a pastor's wife who is more experienced than I. Her husband has retired now and she has the long view of the challenges they faced together during a career in ministry. I asked her, in particular, what to do when I feel like my husband is being tortured. I feel so powerless, so hurt because he is hurt. She told me about times she'd felt the same way. She affirmed that there is nothing for me to *do* about it - no political action to take, no intervention I should stage. She encouraged me to pray for my husband, for peace and some comfort.

I pray for him, for all of us, though certainly not as much as I could. Praying is painful. It reminds me that God is faithful to His promises and it reminds me that right now He seems to be absent from this situation. I try to keep this misery tucked in a box, and talking or praying about it requires opening the box and walking around in it.

Talking with another woman who has gone through similar things was so comforting. I felt like she understood me and cares for me. I was happy, lighter when we parted; three hours later I was on my couch, immobilized. The dull ache of my soul had turned into an acute pain that I could not handle.

Burden of Thoughtfulness

I tend toward thoughtfulness under normal circumstances. I like to think about the world in the abstract. Why do people behave the way they do? What influences us? What shapes our attitudes and expectations? This week I took it as a sign of well-being that I was able to read an essay on the plasticity of the human body in postmodern culture. Sometimes, however, this pattern of abstracted thoughtfulness is annoying. It can be hard for me to feel when I am preoccupied with analysis.

The thoughtfulness that attends my current mental and emotional state is something different. It is profoundly self-centered and much more difficult to escape. This thoughtfulness is not detached from feeling, but actually produces very intense feelings. I can think about myself and swirl around in my moroseness for a long time.

I have, by long habit, become accustomed to attending closely to what other people need. Parenting three children affirms that habit, since they require me to put their needs above mine several hours a day. Being a woman, a pastor’s wife, a person who likes to think herself independent and compassionate: these all reinforce possibly excessive other-centeredness. It is shameful to me that I have swung the other direction entirely. Right now, sustaining attention to someone else’s needs is exhausting.

Maybe the burden is not thoughtfulness so much as self-centeredness. It’s like I’m on a teeter-totter and want to get to the balanced spot where I have the humility to recognize both my needs and other’s needs, but so far I’ve been all teeter or all totter.

Sophistication

I’ve mentioned Rev. Todd Peperkorn’s book, I Trust When Dark My Road in an earlier post. It was a fascinating read for me. I was intrigued that the book really seems to be intended for pastors who are going through depression. I would not have imagined there was such a large population of clergy in this situation.

A July issue of New York Times Magazine included an essay called “The Other 0.1%: Parents’ worst fears almost never materialize” by Matt Bai. He described a freak accident that involved his three-year-old being nearly strangled by a seatbelt. Bai’s point was that crazy, dangerous things happen, but it does not help to live in fear or try to anticipate all of them.

For a while I coped with this horrid situation by assuming it is part of the 0.1%; that this does not happen to many people and would not possibly happen to us again. It seems I assumed incorrectly. Many of the people who read this blog have similar stories of church-induced (or at least church-related) misery.

I suppose I have been naïve. There’s nothing to be gained by fearing future episodes of debilitating illness or cannibalistic church situations. I like to think that my optimism will eventually return, but it will be of a more sophisticated, vigilant variety.

Working on Why

I'm poking around DepressionIsReal, and found this list of factors that usually contribute to depression. It helps me clarify why my diagnosis in particular is so hard for me to accept

Many things can contribute to clinical depression. For some people, a number of factors seem to be involved, while for others a single factor can cause the illness. Oftentimes, people become depressed for no apparent reason.

1. Biological - People with depression typically have too little or too much of certain brain chemicals, called "neurotransmitters." Changes in these brain chemicals may cause or contribute to clinical depression.


2. Cognitive - People with negative thinking patterns and low self-esteem are more likely to develop clinical depression.


3. Gender - Women experience clinical depression at a rate that is nearly twice that of men. While the reasons for this are still unclear, they may include the hormonal changes women go through during menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and menopause. Other reasons may include the stress caused by the multiple responsibilities that women have.


4. Co-occurrence - Clinical depression is more likely to occur along with certain illnesses, such as heart disease, cancer, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease and hormonal disorders.


5. Medications - Side effects of some medications can bring about depression.


6. Genetic - A family history of clinical depression increases the risk for developing the illness.


7. Situational - Difficult life events, including divorce, financial problems or the death of a loved one can contribute to clinical depression. (numbering system mine)

Reasons 1, 2, and 6 are the ones I was familiar with before now. Those reasons don't seem to have caused my depression. In my simplistic logic, this meant I could not be really depressed, just, you know, sort of depressed. For a little while. But it would go away quickly.

Looking through the list, the two definable factors that apply to me are being a woman and living in a difficult situation. The best assessment I can come up with to describe how I wound up in such rough shape is a particular, tragic confluence of a difficult situation at church, social isolation (of having recently moved), and my tendency to try too hard for too long to handle hard things on my own. I can't decide if it would be better for me to stop trying so hard to figure out the why of this.

Breathing Room

Things are better today. As my husband and I have come to describe it to each other, I’ve stepped back from the edge of the cliff.

One thing that helped was going away for the weekend. I took my kids to visit my brother and sister-in-law who live in a nearby city. There are lots of reasons that trip helped: being was away from home, being with people who recognize my sadness and are willing to live alongside it, sharing the responsibility of caring for my kids, being with people who are not depressed. For a couple of days, the pressing weight was lifted enough that I could breathe.

I recently read Rev. Todd Peperkorn’s helpful little book I Trust When Dark My Road: A Lutheran View of Depression. He emphasized the necessity of time and space to think and rest when coping with depression. Acknowledging that seems to have been a big step for him.

This is a struggle for me. I feel like I’m cheating, or admitting defeat, if I need extended time away from home or from my kids. I know this is crazy. I know there is a limit to how much responsibility and stress a person can deal with before being overwhelmed, but I cannot figure out how to judge what that limit is for me. Or how, perhaps, the limit is different right now than it was two years ago. If I cannot do all that I used to do, am I less than I used to be?

Two of Me?

Today was a “normal” day: me alone with my three kids. I played with the kids. I hugged them. We tickled and laughed. We even left the house for a small adventure. We made it through the entire day without anyone melting down into tears. That’s something to celebrate.

My husband came home today with another tale of woe about church. I believe his introduction to the story was, “I don’t think things could get any weirder.” I think he’s said that several times in the last couple of months, and yet the weirdness persists. I listened with attention and empathy.

I’ve fulfilled my roles of mom and wife well today, and that makes me glad. But under all of that is a strong, steady current of sadness and fatigue. Nothing in particular is on my mind to make me feel this way. It’s just there. It’s as though there are two of me, one is heavy, bolted to the ground. The other is happy and in the moment with people I love.

The happy me is inextricably tied to the heavy me, and that makes everything effortful. I think this might be a symptom of depression, and someday I hope I will have recovered fully and will be capable of feeling carefree. Right now, it feels like I have changed completely. Sometimes I think this weight will be with me every hour of every day from now on.

The Wife

When my husband was doing his pastoral internship, what our church calls vicarage, I got my first taste of what it’s like to be “the wife.” We were placed in a church for a one-year term, and I’m not Speedy Gonzalez about making friends, so most people didn’t know me too well. But the people in our congregation were very warm and kind. They often wanted to introduce me to visiting friends or family members. Invariably, the introduction was something like, “Oh, come here and meet the vicar’s wife!”

The Vicar’s Wife.

To me, that was almost like saying, “Come look at the vicar’s nice robe!” I may as well have been an interesting inanimate object. I was young, timid, and uncertain, so I usually nodded politely and said hello and then stood silently listening to the rest of the conversation. I know I imposed this anonymity on myself.

I’ve graduated to pastor’s wife now. Still I often feel like I’m wearing a hat that is too big and obscures my face.

Lately I’ve had occasion to think about the balance between fulfilling social roles and being genuinely myself. There are all kinds of important social roles with rules we need to follow well enough to get along in communities: parent, sibling, child, worker, student, pastor’s wife. I am a pro at following social norms and fulfilling roles. I can read other people’s expectations and almost unintentionally work to meet those expectations.

On the other hand, I’m a little weak on respecting my own idiosyncrasies. In a high-stress situation, where I perceive conflict between what I think/want/feel and what others expect of me, I’ll generally sacrifice the expression of my own feelings.

I am in a high-stress situation. There is a lot of conflict among the leadership in our congregation, and it has come to be focused on my husband. A dutiful, dignified pastor’s wife, I am loathe to say or do anything that might not fit someone’s (I don’t know whose) notion of The Pastor’s Wife.

The upshot of this is that almost everybody likes me. The drawback is that I feel a little sick every time I go to church and I avoid it as much as I can.

I need to take off this damn hat.