Ballycotton and the Blackbird Pub

Eugene Peterson writes that “Three pastoral acts are basic, so critical, that they determine the shape of everything else. The acts are praying, reading Scripture, and giving spiritual direction….[these acts] are quiet…and they constitute acts of attention.”(1) 

Ballycotton Cliff Walk

These are acts of relationship, requiring silence and space that one might attend to what God is doing in Scripture, in self, and in the people of the church and the community. But there is very little room for quiet and attention to relationship in my daily work with the people of the Lawrence Road Church community. This is a very active missional community, accustomed to its pastor being present and active in the leadership of its social justice, education, pastoral care, and fellowship ministries. Beginning my 15th year alongside my congregation, I know that my relationships with them and with my family, my colleagues, and my God require a time of intentional care and feeding. 

As a child, I would walk into the fields above my home and look out over the wide expanses to the Pacific Ocean below, and know somehow that in the wind and the waves and the silence was soul food that I needed, truly my help that comes from the Lord. When I consider what makes my heart sing, I know it is this, the quiet to attend to what God is doing in me and around me and the wide open space to nurture my relationships with family and friends and recover a sense of myself as one who walks before the Lord in the land of the living. 

For me, renewal is the time to read and to study and to write, to worship with others in the pew, to explore the spiritual practices of contemplative Christian faith, to enjoy my family and my God not because it is my job to do so but because it is my joy. 

Yesterday I made reservations for the first leg of my sabbatical travel. Courtesy of the Clergy Renewal Project of the Indianapolis-based Lilly Foundation, the fam and I are going to Ireland in late September to walk the Ballycotton Cliff Walk, to hunt seashells on the beach with the kiddos, to sit in the seat of giants. And you can be sure that someplace in there, I will hoist a pint at the Blackbird to the Lilly folk for the gift of space and time and joy.

(1)Eugene H. Peterson. Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmanns Publishing Co., 1993) 3.