Lake of fire

When I was younger, I imagined that people who inhabited the pastor role had some specific set of skills that made them uniquely suited to sift through the wreckage of human pain that they encountered. I imagined that they strode confidently into rooms where people were coping with tragedy and death and doubt and loss and grief and crushing pain and anger and fear armed with just the right words for the job, just the right Bible verses, just the right insight into when to give someone a hug and when to give them space, just the right prayers, just the right ability to project just the right combination of warmth and decisiveness and spiritual authority (whatever that might mean), just the right combination of attitudes and attributes to make bad situations somehow better.

And then I became a pastor.

And I began walking into these rooms where the air was thick with sorrow of all kinds. I began to sit with teenagers with bandaged arms to hide the blade marks and middle aged men who were talking suicide and weary couples staggering through the last days of a dying marriage and people who were angry at others and the church for reasons they couldn’t even articulate and parents struggling with teenagers who seemed hell-bent on burning their lives to the ground and old men who were dying bitter and alone and young women who had been discarded like trash and men who had struggled their whole lives with addiction and racism and abuse, whose bodies were beginning to betray them, whose minds were playing the very worst sorts of tricks on them.