"Stand in the place where you live, now face north. Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before." -R.E.M.

Two Worlds

02/21/2010 12:37 AM Filed in: Pastoral Stuff | Personal

About a year ago Emily decided that she wanted to go back to school and become a nurse. She had a college degree already but couldn’t find much to do with it and she wasn’t enjoying her job at the time. We’ve always wanted each other to be happy with our professions and so I encouraged her to pursue her interests and so did the rest of her family. Her parents even very graciously offered to pay for her school and help us out financially in an incredibly generous way.

At the time I also realized I’d need to bring in a little extra income while she did this because we have quite a bit of student loan debt from seminary and we also have a decent chunk of credit card debt from not having much money and not always making the best decisions from when we first got married.

I’ll write about this in more detail soon, but I started a web design firm and have been getting quite a bit of business. It’s been great: I’m meeting people in Springfield I wouldn’t otherwise meet, I’m helping them out, and I’m bringing in some extra money for our bills.

But some weeks it’s simply exhausting. In addition to the 40-50 hours I work each week at Milestone, I have weeks where I put in an additional 20-40 hours with the web studio (like this last week). This often means little sleep, a perpetual sense of never being “caught up”, and an unhealthy dependency on 5 Hour Energy.

This is not a gripe; I love my work at the church and I’ve found that my work in the web development community has gone hand-in-hand with being a pastor. After all, I’m getting to know and influence people all over the city that I probably never would have met unless I’d been willing to roll up my sleeves and do some work in the secular world. But I’m trying to find a balance and I feel like it’s eluding me. I often feel like I bounce from one world (pastoring a church) to another (developing websites) and the disconnect between the two can often be jarring. One minute I’m working through difficult issues of prayer and counseling with a church partner, the next I’m explaining to a web client that it’s not a good idea to have 80’s hair band music auto-playing at full blast when someone goes to their health insurance website (yes...true story). One minute I’m organizing mission trips and talking to a local pastor about how he should handle a church member who’s poisoning the rest of his people, the next minute I’m trying to figure out WHY THE HECK THE WEBSITE WON’T DISPLAY PROPERLY IN INTERNET EXPLORER 6!!! (sorry...I get a little emotional about that)

So in conclusion: I’m running low on sleep and I’m in a constant state of whiplash. The church is by far my first love and it’s where the bulk of my time is spent, but I’m still having to invest some very heavy hours into my web business. Maybe the answer is hiring more part-time help, but until Emily is done with school we really need the money.

I suppose if I never figure it all out I can at least take comfort in knowing that it won’t have to be like this forever. In a little over a year Em will be done with school and I can take on a few less projects and not have to work non-stop all the time. Until then, you’ll have to forgive me if this blog gets neglected from time to time (as if that hasn’t already happened).

Tags: Pastor, Milestone Church, Authentic Studios