How is your life different?
For some of us, our first year in the SLO lane is now in its final stages. If you're a student at Cal Poly, unless you're staying on for summer school, you've just started your last quarter of the year . If you're a senior pastor like me — I've been pastoring here for 6 months now — then you're really at the stage of leaving one life behind and truly discovering another. It seems like some people's lives never change, they live in the same place, do the same things, while others go through one change after another. So, I just have to ask this question:
How is your life different than you expected it to be?
For me, well, by now I thought we'd be a larger congregation than we are. However, I never expected it to be as effective and as fun as it has been. Nor did I expect the new relationships that have formed to develop quite like they have. I love my new friends, and furthermore, they love me, and I know it.
At my last ministry position I found myself stuck in a vicious cycle. I had one hundred twenty-five volunteers, and twelve ministry plans (yearly goals) to meet. I was working 50 hours a week and trying to be a father, a husband and a pastor. I will try with all of my might never to return to that lifestyle. I learned a lot about management, and I am grateful, but I also learned that the proper perspective is that my job enables me to live, not my life enables me to work. I love this town of San Luis Obispo, and every day I become more and more a part of the SLO life. In short, I dig it.
So what about you? How is your life different than you expected it to be?
Posted by | 3:47 PM
1 comments
Wow, honey, I really like how you worded this post. I too thought life out here would be "harder" in respects to so much change!
The things that were hard that I didn't expect were - finding a place to live, finding a new job, the business side of the church, and it was lonely at first (before we met people)
The things that I thought would be hard but turned out to be GREAT was the whole church service part - the mobile aspects of setting up and tearing down, getting the word out, being bi-vocational but all these things I LOVE!
It's funny though, expectation vs realization because I think we all try to have an idea of what it will like just so we can have some peace because the unknown is so scary but then as you come to the change and realize what it "is" like then you have to get your mind around that.
Change whether good or bad is still change and it's still a hard process but I too am sooooo happy to be here in SLO because it's finally "home"!
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