It’s not that I am against work. It’s that I am against unnecessary work. As a pastor’s wife for now over 15 years I have gotten very good at identifying where there is excess work happening in the church arena that at least in my opinion are things that could be pared down or eliminated. One of these things happens to be the way our church does their Christmas Eve services. In the past there is an evening children’s program, a regular Divine Service evening program, and then a midnight service.

Christmas and Easter seasons for pastors are like their big times of the year where they get to give it their all and be proud of how much work they are doing. I don’t mean that in a bad way or think that is something that needs to be taken from them. Those are particularly busier times for them, and sometimes busier is good. You get a rush and high from it and find purpose and joy in it. But when your children’s program is designed for a 30+ children Sunday School and yours currently is much smaller, then it’s time to reconsider the way the church does things. When your program in the past was directed by an elite musician and paid DCE, and now what you have is a volunteer mom and a handful of volunteer teachers, it’s time to consider changing things.

We had another meeting at church tonight. I have told them that I am not going to continue on the board after my term ends at the end of the year. I also brought up that I do not want to be the one in charge of and organizing the Christmas program this year. I did it last year, along with the breakfast in Bethlehem event that I was not fully on board with, and in the month of December along with everything else, I was so completely stressed. I still want to have some semblance of peace and enjoyment in the holiday season without it being completely overtaken by parts-assigning, practices, and paper writing overload. I am trying to speak up and communicate my needs but it seems like I sure do have a lot of them. I need margin and space in my life.

My mother-in-law was listing off all of the area widows that she knows. She mentioned how it’d be nice to have some sort of support group where they could meet once a month and get together. That is the kind of church work I would have no problem doing. One of the local churches used to have a parish nurse who was involved in creating these kinds of support groups. She visited sick members and was very involved with ministering to individuals and families. This again is the kind of thing I’d like to do. At the funeral luncheon a friend and I were standing there peering into the church kitchen admiring the women hard at work with the food. Not everybody in there loves what they do.

Our time will come, she said. The time for us to be the church ladies. When we are the older ones scurrying around on a weekday afternoon. I do want so much to be more involved in ministry work but my life right now seems to allow such little time for it. You keep thinking there will be a better time, when the kids are older, or older still, or life isn’t so busy, or when I’m more healed. It doesn’t seem from what I’ve heard that life really slows down all that much. People are always talking about how busy things are and how much is going on in their life even as their children are grown. And yet I know there has to be space that comes somewhere. It’s not that I want to get out of work. It’s that I want to be best spent wherever it is being done. There’s always work to do here.