Grace and wonder

Although when looking back on 2020, most of us are finding it hard to forget the challenges wrought by the pandemic, social unrest, and political strife, there were positive trends that many people are carrying forward. 

Volunteering, creativeness, innovation, and giving have become more evident, and national newscasters are actually competing with one another for the best stories showing selflessness and courage.

Over Christmas, British sports administrators even found ways to duck political correctness and share messages appropriate for the season.

As we watched unfamiliar snow falling steadily on  the West Bromwich/Arsenal soccer game, we couldn’t miss the way the empty stands were filled with a fifty-yard sign, The Lord is My Shepherd, while at Stamford Bridge in London where Chelsea were playing Manchester City, the message was equally bold, Born is the King!

Someone, I suspect, who would readily have approved of this inspirational forward move is the president of Princeton Theological  Seminary, Craig Barnes, whom I featured in my blogpost last July on the subject of home.

What I didn’t have space to mention there was Barnes’s latest book, which my extended time at home has made it easier to absorb and be enriched by.

It’s Diary of a Pastor’s Soul (Brazos Press, 2020), which tells the story of a fictionalized pastor embarking on his final year before retirement. Yet no one who knows and admires the writing and teaching of Craig Barnes will be confused by the interplay of fact and fiction in this personal revelation of the challenges and privileged blessings of the pastoral vocation. (Or as the subtitle puts it, The Holy Moments in a Life of Ministry).

As Barnes explains in his preface, he soon realized that he couldn’t write about his own life without telling stories; and he couldn’t tell other people’s stories without violating pastoral confidentiality.

So he acquired a narrator of sorts, a diarist through whom to share observations that might inspire others—and allow Barnes to rewrite some of his own stories that he might have lived differently had he known then what he later understood better. (His diarist even has a prologue of his own.)

In two-page entries, we quickly learn about such topics as the diarist’s wife’s fascination with mustang sports cars; meaningful use of the phrase “I love you,” inside and outside of church; wise handling of financial planners; pastoral lessons from sheepdogs; being Joseph in the Christmas pageant; sins we cannot forgive; and the inescapable discovery that there is no theology of retirement.

And Barnes summarizes this pulpit view of a pastor’s soul in one crisp and memorable sentence:

“We’re created to live each day under heaven as an internal gift filled with more grace and wonder than we know how to recover or could ever see.”

I can think of no better gift any of us could receive than this book itself, with its subtle reflections on the life of the man to whom it is dedicated, John Buchanan, former editor and publisher of The Christian Century.