Take Me Home

I just returned from a trip to Sutton, West Virginia on conference business where the committee I am on met with several West Virginia pastors in our denomination.

West Virginia, even when viewed from only the interstate, is a beautiful state.  The landscape is breathtaking to a Hoosier like me, because in central Indiana where I live there are no mountains and hardly any hills at all.  One resident joked that if West Virginia were flattened out that Texas would no longer be the largest state in the Union. 

I found the people of West Virginia to have great wit and easy to engage in conversation.  And the believers we met were devoted to Christ and their ministries.  Most of our pastors in West Virginia are bi-vocational, meaning they work a secular job while pastoring a church.  Their dedication to the Lord amidst a difficult life is admirable.  I could not help but reflect on how difficult it would be for me to uproot and move to serve a church in West Virginia and find sufficient secular work to support my family.  Apart from God's provision, I don't see how I could do it.  But God has raised up leaders from within West Virginia and provided them with jobs that make it possible to pastor small, rural churches that cannot pay a pastor much at all.  And what is more, the pastors of these small churches seem to harbor no resentment that they cannot do ministry full-time.

All this reminds me of the great priviledge that I have in serving my congregagation full-time and how I must not squander the time God has given me.  Thank God for how he uses the lives of others to increase appreciation of our own.