They say the life of a firefighter can be described as hours upon hours of boredom, punctuated by moments of sheer terror. My dad’s firehouse stories tended to verify that description. After serving nearly 25 years in the pastorate, I can see a parallel with the pastor’s lot. Can we encapsulate the life of the pastor as “days and days of tedious, thankless sheep-tending, punctuated by moments of ineffable glory”? Moses might go for that one.

My ministry has spanned enough years that I have a few pretty good stories to tell. Give me thirty more years and they will be spellbinding. The trouble is, it takes an awful lot of trudging along in faithfulness, doing what pastors are supposed to do, before these good stories begin to accumulate. They don’t come every Sunday, or every week, or even every month. True, they may occasionally arrive in bunches; but they’re usually spread out. And the really good ones—the true “God moments”—just don’t come as often as we would like. But when they do occur, they make up for all the tedium of in-between times.