Maintaining a Pastor's Heart
Kent Hughes
To have a pastor's heart means to enter into the joy as well as the pain of our congregations, even when the joy and the pain are just moments apart.
—Kent Hughes Kirsten is blond and blue-eyed, a stunning beauty. She has attended our church for several years and has been a deeply committed Christian for as long as I've known her. When she became engaged to a young man named Stephen, the two of them asked me to do their wedding. Together, they were a picture-perfect couple. Kirsten's tall athletic beauty was matched by Stephen's lean, muscular good looks. Though only in his mid-twenties, Stephen was already employed in an extremely lucrative profession. In addition, Stephen had recently committed his life to the Lord and had immediately immersed himself in his newfound faith. The day of the wedding came—a rainy day in spring. Yet nothing, not even rain, could dampen the joy and excitement of that day—or so I thought. The wedding was scheduled for 4:30 in the afternoon. I was already at church at 3:30, preparing for the wedding ceremony, when the phone rang. It was Janet, a young woman in our congregation. Her husband Ray, who was only in his late thirties, had died suddenly only an hour before. He had no history of heart problems, yet he had dropped dead of a massive heart attack while doing light yard work. Compressed into the space of a couple hours on this rainy spring was the full range of emotions that sometimes ebb, sometimes surge in the heart of a pastor. Here were the great joys, the rude shocks, the deep sorrows, all jumbled together. Ray was one of the most vital members of my congregation. In a heartbeat, he was gone. How do you go into the sanctuary and perform a wedding ceremony on top of news like that? And yet ...
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