The Pastor's Soul Volume 1: The Power of Loving Your Church

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THE BALL-CAP CRISIS illustrates the kind of emotional dilemma that kills our pastoral love. Lessons like that stack up pretty fast in ministry. They remind me of the Calvinist who, upon falling down a flight of stairs, shook himself off and declared, "Boy, I'm glad that's over!"

I realize a certain number of debacles are inevitable and that they are good for me. I've tried to learn from my failures, and I think I handle things a little better than I used to. The problem is that though the pain caused by generic human foolishness makes me wiser, it tends to make me ambivalent in my pastoral work.

The word ambivalence means "not being able to decide on an issue." Specifically, it means not being able to give ourselves in love, all because of inner pain that shies our will away from any course of action. Ambivalence causes excessive fluctuation on issues, and it can cause an obsession with fluctuation to the point that no decision can be made. Ambivalence is by nature paradoxical. On the one hand, it can cause us to do pastoral work with more than a healthy professional distance. On the other hand, it lowers our natural, healthy defenses and can make us unsure of our personal boundaries. It often causes us to retreat into self-centered self-love as a defense against risking mature, adult love. We become vulnerable to unhealthy forms of love and unhealthy forms of self-sacrifice.

Ambivalence masks itself as wisdom, whispering, "Don't get involved, it only hurts to care. Don't make a decision, someone will be disappointed and you'll have to backtrack.…"

This is pseudo-wisdom, leaking into the consciousness from a part of our spirit that refuses to be hurt again; loss, particularly any loss that signals death, is intolerable. Losing ...

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