The following is re-posted with permission.
Nobody tells you that Sunday can hold all of it at once.
Yesterday we dedicated eight babies to God. Eight families. Eight sets of nervous, beaming, exhausted parents holding their most precious things and trusting me to speak something holy over them. It was one of the most beautiful moments I’ve had in ministry.
Then everyone else went home.
And a small family stayed behind.
That baby should have been number nine, but then the unthinkable happened and their baby was born still.
And instead of a dedication they got a memorial. In the same room. On the same day.
Still running on the same adrenaline that got me through that morning. I sat with them and we remembered a child who never got to take a breath outside the womb. And I tried to find words for something that doesn’t have any.
There’s no training for that. You just show up.
I came home and took a nap. Not because I was tired. Because my soul needed somewhere quiet.
Then I got up and tried to be Dad. Just Dad. Not the guy who holds everybody else’s grief. Just the one who sits on the floor and laughs and tries to actually be present for his own kids.
Pastors don’t get a bad day and a good day. We get one day that is oftentimes both.
I’m not saying this for sympathy. I’m saying it because the person on that platform Sunday morning might have just left a hospital room. Or a really hard conversation. Or their own kitchen table, where things aren’t okay either.
Pray for your pastor. Not just the version you see up front. The whole human being underneath it.
They’re doing their best to hold other people’s hardest moments while still showing up for their own lives.
That’s the calling. It’s heavy and beautiful and impossible and sacred all at the same time.