ken wilson online

I like talking to young pastors because I feel no need to dance around and be overly pastoral.  I can be blunt, because there’s too much at stake not to be. There are too many pastors I’ve known who haven’t faced things head on, haven’t had someone talking blunt to them.   For example seminaries will take your money, but how often does anyone say, “You can come out of seminary THOUSANDS of dollars in debt.  Have you thought about what impact that will have on your capacity to serve in a church?”   But that’s not what this post is about. This one’s about a little agreement every pastor should have with his/her spouse or if single, a trusted friend.

The little pact is this: if you think I need to go to the doctor, or go to see a counselor, or get a second opinion on a decision I’m about to make, you just tell me and I’ll do it, even if I don’t feel like doing it.  Obviously, you don’t make this little pact with just anyone, but a trusted someone.  If you’re not willing to trust a trusted someone with this kind of power, what’s the point in trusting someone?

Marriages get stuck, often over one issue or another that one of the parties to the marriage is struggling with.  The spouse of the struggling partner suggests, cajolls (sp?), recommends, all to no avail.  And around that stuckness, resentment builds, and sometimes the seed of relationship’s destruction or ruin or deep marring  forms, right there at that spot.

After my father died, I got mildly depressed. It was affecting me and everything around me.  I didn’t want to take steps to address the depression because depression puts you in the kind of funk where steps of any kind don’t seem worthwhile.  But Nancy and I have made the little pact.  We’ve given each other a trump card to play with each other when needed.  We don’t play it often, but when we do we mean business.  And she meant business when she played her card: “Ken, you need some help with this, and I’m asking you to get it, based on our prior agreement that if I ever ask like this, you’ll cooperate with my request.”

So I made the call to the counselor and we sat down talked. And she told me (the grief counselor that is) that I was depressed and needed a little help with that.  And we came up with a plan and the plan helped and I’m so glad I made that little pact with my trusted friend.

Advice to young pastors: go find your spouse (or if single, your most trusted friend) and propose that  this little pact be made with them.  Right now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 7:02 am and is filed under advice to young pastors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.