Logrolling became a two-person sport with the goal of dumping one’s opponent in the water through fancy footwork. It seems like an apt metaphor for the precarious work of keeping our balance in ministry; indeed in all of life. The unsettling news is that, sooner or later, the person on the other end of your log is God.

I’ve never tried that logrolling but I know what it is to feel like I can’t move my feet any faster and I’m about to lose my balance and go under. Competitive logrolling is not for shepherds.

You can find a lot of leadership guidance for breaking up church logjams but not so much on helping you keep your head above water when they happen. … Pastoring by example is like logrolling.

“I was vicar of large things
in a small parish.”
Andy, who pastors in a little Minnesota burg of 300 people, reads that poem every week. He likes it, he says, “because it speaks against the desire for great things in a great place.”

Pastoring, as we all know too well, can sometimes be a brutal business. Paul warned us, and Jesus, of course. For most of us ministry has been deeply gratifying but occasionally it can kick the stuffing out of a person. It’s a hard-found humility, and some pastors only come out resentful or arrogant, but I admire those who’ve lost some of their bravado, who got small without getting bitter.

God’s wisdom doesn’t typically come like a bolt out of the blue. It’s more like a very enlightening conversation where holy insights dawn on us. We discover and understand holy treasures by reading and hearing Scripture but we internalize them in prayer, bringing our own daily case studies under our Father’s tutelage.