What comes next?

I have written and deleted the first sentence here five times in seven minutes. How to begin, what to say...

I want to complain that I am so busy, that my life is full of stress, that I am overloaded and there are too many thigns to do. I want to cry and moan and b!%&# about it, but I really cant. Yes, a single week with two funerals and a wedding, plus all the other regular things is a full plate. Yes, I have been going pretty hard these days, but the truth is I love it.

I love being tired at the end of the day. I love being availible for people in crisis and doing some practical good in the world. I love sharing the most difficult and intimate moments in the lives of my friends. I love what I do, and I love the people in my life.

Ministry is a tough gig, no doubt. You get to be open for criticism and complaint, you get too much responsibility for any individual to bear, and you loose sleep over other people's problems. If one is in ministry and has no sense of the divine call to the work, I imagine it will kill you, drive you crazy, make you into a sniveling wreck.

But there is a powerful presence in my life that sustains me. The Spirit of God goes with me, strengthens me, watches over me, gives me wisdom and grace to deal with all the stuff. And it is good.

I love every minute of it. I love the people in my life. And I am happier these days than I have ever been. Life is good.

Technology is great.

But I still don't understand it. People smarter than me have gotten our new church website up and running, and you can link from our website right to here. That's kind of neat. My next chore it make a link from here to there. Look for it on the sidebar.

Anyway, Thanks Karri C, for all your hard work in helping Charles Town Baptist a 21st century church.

Some New Thing

I've seen this done a thousand times. Just needed to try.

Here we go again.

If I could just do it once a week. No, not that, but this. If I could just find a few minutes to scribble on the keyboard to share a thought with all of you on a regular and consistent basis, perhaps I could call this blog project a success in ministry instead of a pain in the neck. Enough of that.

Vacation last week, and it was a grand time. But no ordinary vacation. Part of the gig was a memorial service for my father, Wayne Hotaling, dead last fall at the age of 70, from liver failure. Sad in too many ways.

So anyway, I met my up with all the family on the lake in the Adirondacks where we would spend our summers way back when. It was a great day, bluebird skies, old friends, lots of laughter and a bit of sadness. We scattered his ashes in the lake, probably breaking several laws, but the only fitting place for a man who spent the best days of his life in such a beautiful place.

Because I am the minister, I got to share a few thoughts with those that had gathered. About life, and the shortness of time, about my father's absence in my life and how I learned to deal with it. I chose the route of total honesty, with a large hand full of grace and forgiveness. The message came out alright, and I think it was helpful to some of my family that had been struggling with it all. But it sure was hard. Good, but hard to do.

It seems I think about him more now that he is dead than I ever did when he was living.