It is that time of year again–time to dress up the church building in pagan festal greens and reds. I signed up to show up Saturday morning with the three older ones. However, at 9:30 a.m. I was still chipping away at the ice-bastille that had encased itself around my car. It was taking longer than I had planned. Finally, I got the children in the car (through the doors that weren’t still frozen shut) and started backing out my–here’s foreshadowing for you–inclined, narrow driveway.

Well I hadn’t realized that the tree in our neighbor’s yard was hanging over, bowed with ice, so that backing through it was like going through a tapestry of woven bullets. I got distracted and put the car against the neighbor’s hedge before clearing the end of the driveway. This can actually happen on a clear summer day and sometimes we have to put a vehicle in the forward gear, pull up a few feet, and re-aim the back fo the car for the street below.

Well, the car was on a patch of ice, so there was no way I could pull up and get back to the middle of the driveway. With the left side of the car against the hedge, I had to slide out on the passenger side, as did the other children.

When we got out, I looked around at how the car was lodged and did some shoveling to give us some traction to pull out of it. Then realized that both doors on the passenger sides had iced over again. I couldn’t pull them open. Fortunately, I had taken my travel cup of hot coffee out of the car with me, and dribbled it over the edge of the door to melt the ice and/or turn it into a chocolaty color.

The doors still wouldn’t budge. After several futile tries and running out of coffee without drinking any, I noticed that the ice had never been the issue. I had locked us out of the car while getting out.

And my house keys were in the car.

So I make the obligatory phone call to Jennifer who has a key to the car on her keychain. But she is up on Manchester going to the Build-a-bear place because Charis got invited to a birthday party there for a dear church friend. And Jennifer would prefer not to make Charis miss it and I don’t blame her. She wants me to call the church to see if anyone can come over from the pagan festal decorating and jimmy a door. I, on the other hand, am ashamed I am not there helping already, and don’t want to add injury by pulling someone away from the tasks.

Then I notice that the back driver-side door is open a crack. It was locked but unlatched. One of my kids had first tried to go out that way before realizing the hedge completely blocked it.

This is where the stress of the events must have started dampening my I.Q. points (that’s the excuse I’m using to keep my self-esteem from flattening, anyway). I spent twenty minutes of trying to pry open the door as widely as I could and bodily inserting my skinnier children through the crack. Then Calvin suggested using a long pole of some sort to reach across and open the passenger side door.

Even then my brain could not kick into gear. I had a vehicle with a panel of switches on the driver’s door that controlled all the windows, yet I spent five minutes trying to hook the edge of a hoe under a door lock. It was only after trying to reach across and apply upward pressure all from the power of an extended risk that I realized, after a few steps, that I could simply hook the switch on the door panel and pull. The window came down immediately. We showed up about an hour late cold and really wet from all the pressing against the car and manhandling the ice-laden branches.

Yesterday was the inception of year 39 for me. My kids sang for me and gave me ultra-dark chocolate that tastes like it should cause me to develop magical powers. My wife gave me a nice jug full of Irish Cream Liqueur–which I’ve drunk straight thus far. Great stuff! We enjoyed a yellow cake with green frosting. I only got four candles because Jennifer divided by ten and rounded up. I don’t know if that’s covered in the Rulebook of Wish Granting or not, since I had so few to blow out. My parents and the Craws both ponied up with gift certificates at Amazon.com. I really have a lot of books I haven’t yet read here but, buying knew ones is sort of a status thing for me, so I got Voldemort’s latest tract and the latest novel from my favorite science fiction author. (OK, perhaps second favorite, but I have most of his stuff already–and they’re pretty hard to compare, another victim of the infinite genre problem that is scifi.) I also bought Unreal Tournament 2004.

Other than that it was a pretty normal Sunday. Jeff preached on Romans 12.3ff and opened it with a surprise (I was surprised and flattered) plug for a recent blog entry of mine. He did some appropriate paraphrasing at points and made one addition that I should have though of myself: “Enjoy [and be content with] the luxuries you have.” Thus far, I’ve not interacted with the questions about how what I’m saying jives with “taking up one’s cross,” partly because others have gotten my back, and partly because, well, I thought refusing to take revenge and being happy with what one has and inviting undesirables (which, in point of fact, has a great deal to do with why Jesus was put on the cross) was challenging enough. What, you do all that easily and want a new challenge? Then you’re going to have to go get advice from someone more sanctified than I am.

We’ve been rotating Sunday school teaching between Ministers and Elders (that’s TEs and RE’s in dysphonious BOCO-speak) on the topic of work and economics. I’ve already done my power-point session (which I imperialistically expanded into two) on free-market ideology as Biblical ethics, so I’ll be learning for the rest of the series. There are some experienced businessmen who are revealing stuff I would never have known otherwise. I remember a few weeks ago having a family over in which we talked about the husband’s business. He provides a service to the MO/IL St. Louis Metro region. He used to own a much bigger version of the business elsewhere and was bought out. He also knows the the CEOs/owners of national chains of the same business. He told me he knows what they make and their income simply isn’t that much different than his own. You just don’t get that much extra profit by growing after a point. So he was content with what he had.

I filed this as an anomaly and didn’t think much of it until, in one of these Sunday School classes, the teacher told us that, as he had massively expanded his business over the last few years, his personal bottom line had not changed much at all. This man was in a completely different industry, but he too had been content with a much smaller corporation. When he was challenged to grow, it was not for the sake of any personal gain but more for the sake of intangibles–being able to provide a quality workplace for more quality people, etc.

That is the sort of thing I would never have guessed if someone hadn’t told me.

Sunday night was “Ask the pastor,” and I participated with two others, fielding questions from Ephesians 6 about “this present darkness” and forces of wickedness “in the heavenly places.” I may use that for blog entries at some point.

One of my main sources of ministry satisfaction has been a Bible study I lead at a workplace every (hypothetically every) Friday morning. Between sickness, Thanksgiving, and the weather, we have not been able to meet in a while and I miss it. I’ll be delivering the Christmas meditation at our service, and I will probably have other preaching opportunities, but I really enjoy the face-to-face interaction of less packaged teaching that I can do in that setting.

I suppose I should get to the reason for the title of this piece. I’ve got to transition to a bivocational call as of January First. I knew that this was probably going to happen when I took the call to St. Louis. I am glad I am here. But this has been a source of pretty horrendous pressure on me during the last six months or whenever it suddenly hit Jennifer and me, “Wow, Mark needs to have a job lined up!”

I had and still have pretty much ruled out moving away from Saint Louis. This isn’t because we are absolutely opposed to the idea, but because we won’t do it for the sorts of situations which have induced us to relocate in the past. Jennifer and I probably spent a few hours every week at our last call discussing whether she should work or I should try to get a second job (Duh, I should have). The problem was it is pretty difficult to do that when you are in a tiny rural town at least half an hour from anything that might provide employment. I know that small churches need pastors as much as anyone, but someone who has a second source of income or a smaller family is going to have to provide that.

But, despite being a pastor with now eight years experience, I don’t see much opportunity right now. The informal ruling regime is not making it easy. Being a member in good standing in a presbytery is, at this point, is pretty much like being an African-American in Mississippi at the turn of the century–lots of rights on paper, but your gambling to rely on them by say, showing up at the polls or [in my case] showing up at another presbytery with a call to a church. The chance of finding a church that can support me and my family and wants me enough to battle a hostile presbytery just seems remote.

So I’m staying here and looking for work I can do that will support the family. That has been the the issue that has been consuming my attention and which I have not been mentioning on my blog.

And so far nothing has yet materialized.

And it is December.

So please pray for us. Pray for Jennifer. There is the pressure of needing work that will support us and then the pressure of realizing that I’m not supporting my family with my real vocation and then (though it ought not matter to me) the pressure of knowing I’m letting some people do a happy dance by revealing openly that this is happening.

But one last thing. I spent the last few months trying to convince myself that a new career should mean a new vocation. That the last decade of seminary and pastoring should mean nothing or simply be a temporary detour. This is what I told people. This is what I repeated to myself in an attempt at self-hypnosis. Didn’t work. Can’t happen. Like it or not, I’m a minister of the Gospel. Support myself by it or make tents to support myself in it, I can’t change it. That is all.