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Preventing Pastoral Burnout While You Light the Advent Candles

Judi Schwanz

How do you feel right now about Christmas 2008?

That may seem like an odd question. Others may ask you what you are doing for Advent and Christmas, but I invite you to consider how you feel as you anticipate the Advent season. Some pastors may feel overwhelmed already, and sense their blood pressure rising as the calendars fill up and to-do lists grow. Others may still be in denial of the coming holiday season. Their motto is: “I’ll get through the Halloween candy and the Thanksgiving turkey before I get caught up in Christmas.” Whatever your approach, the commonly accepted view is that the Christmas season is a stressful, busy time of year.

In June 1977, my husband, Keith, and I moved to Oregon. He served part-time as an associate pastor. He also found a job at Lloyd Center, a beautiful open-air shopping mall, on the electrician’s crew. On sunny summer days, he spent most of his working hours in the dingy enclosed storage area underneath one of the stores. He stood with two other men at a long table, screwing light bulbs into serpentine cords of Christmas tree lights and checking each one to make sure it worked in preparation for the November lighting ceremony. Christmas in July!

You may not start your holiday preparations as early as July. But, then again, you might. Perhaps you’re one of those fun-loving ministers of music who begins the fall season of choir practice with a “Christmas in September” party, complete with red and green cookies, decorations, and a sneak preview of the Christmas music. Or, you may be a crafter who starts working at your sewing machine or in your workshop in June to prepare handmade gifts for the coming December.

Preparing

With all the preparations, we would do well to stop and ask ourselves what we are preparing for. In many cases, our preparations focus on a specific event: the Christmas Eve service, the children’s program, the Christmas cantata. In other cases, we focus on a “holiday season.” We plan worship services, attend parties, buy and wrap gifts, address cards, decorate homes and sanctuaries, bake cookies, play Christmas music—all within a six week period between Thanksgiving and the 12th Day of Christmas.

Often pastors feel like they’re fighting a tidal wave of “stuff” to remind people of the “reason for the season.” Some advocate boycotting those stores that substitute the word “holiday” for “Christmas” in their advertising, thinking we will somehow preserve a spiritual quality in our shopping. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with these attempts, what we really need to do is focus on preparing our hearts for Christ’s coming. Yet, often heart preparation is squeezed out by all the physical or material preparation. In the words of the beloved carol, God calls us to “let every heart prepare Him room.”

Mary and Joseph prepared for the coming Child. I imagine once the shock of Gabriel’s message wore off, Mary became very practical. Having a baby meant a lot of preparation. She couldn’t just run to the local Wal-Mart and register for everything she needed. She may have enlisted the help of her mother and other women to prepare clothing and warm blankets for the baby. She probably helped Joseph choose the wood for a cradle to be crafted in his carpenter’s shop.

In the midst of all their to-do lists, Mary and Joseph also had a lot of spiritual and emotional work to do. They each had a message from an angel. They must have heard whispers around them—innuendos about the timing of Mary’s pregnancy, questions about their morality, perhaps even rumors about their sanity when they claimed an angel had visited them. Yet, they had both heard the message from God announcing the pending birth and encouraging them to have no fear. As the time for the birth drew near, Mary and Joseph must have also drawn near to God in anticipation of what lay ahead. They prepared their hearts and lives to receive the Son of God.

And they waited. As a mother and a grandmother, I’ve learned that babies come when they’re ready. Mary didn’t have the advantage of medicines to induce labor, so she had to wait for the “fullness of time” to deliver her child. Preparation often includes waiting.

Then the decree from Caesar Augustus came. Mary and Joseph’s physical preparations had to be laid aside as they packed the bare necessities for the arduous journey to Bethlehem. Instead of a lovingly crafted cradle, they would lay their child in a manger filled with hay. Once Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, their time of waiting ended. They had prepared their hearts as well as they knew how. They had followed God to the land of their ancestors and would now see the fulfillment of the angel’s promise to them.

Pondering

“But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). To ponder means to think deeply about something, to consider it carefully.

After all the preparation and the waiting had ended, and after the shepherds had gone, Mary took time to ponder all that had happened. Pondering is an important corollary to preparation. Anticipation gives way to reflection. Mary may have rested in the evening, reliving the delivery of her baby, marveling at the child in her arms, and repeating to herself the story the shepherds had told them about their angelic messengers. As she considered the shepherds’ account, she must have also recalled the words of the angel Gabriel, spoken to her just nine months earlier: “the holy one to be born will be called Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Yet, He looked just like any other baby! How could God have entrusted this special Child to her care?

Mary’s thoughts focused on God and all God had done. From the moment of Gabriel’s first greeting, her life had changed forever. Just as God had spoken to and provided for her and Joseph in these recent months, surely God will provide and direct them in the future.

What do you ponder or treasure as you reflect on past Christmases? Often people respond to this question with stories of special times with family, or uniquely meaningful gifts. Unfortunately, too many of us identify with the cartoon of the parents collapsing, exhausted, on the couch on the evening of December 25, as they exclaim, “We survived another Christmas!” Instead of angelic messages, we may recall stress-induced arguments with those we love most dearly.

On January 15, 2009, what would you like to ponder about Christmas 2008? How wonderful if, like Mary, we could reflect on the Christmas past and remember the message of the angels: “The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28) and “a Savior has been born to you” (2:11). What difference might it make in the New Year to recall Gabriel’s assurance that “nothing is impossible with God” (1:37)? If we want to ponder this message after Christmas, we must plan to hear the words of the message throughout the Advent season.

Planning

If anticipation will give way to reflection, I suggest that we would do well to prepare for Christmas with our future pondering in mind. Often we focus on planning: making lists and checking them twice. There is nothing inherently wrong with lists, but we might think about the kinds of items that fill our lists. If we know what we’d like to ponder in January, what do we need to plan in November and December to provide material for our reflections? I have a few suggestions:

Write out a spiritual to-do list. Perhaps you would like to create an advent wreath with your family and spend time together each evening or each week focusing on Scripture. Think about what you would like to read, how much time you want to devote to prayer, both privately and corporately. Maybe attending a performance of The Messiah or visiting a living nativity would feed your soul.

Take out your calendar and decide when you will do the things on your spiritual to-do list. Write them in your schedule.
While you still have your calendar open, mark out those days when you will enjoy Sabbath rest. Sabbath is a commitment to time with God: times of refreshing and renewing ourselves, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Just like Mary waited for the coming of the Christ Child, we must allow ourselves to “wait” for God. We can only wait when we have margin in our lives. Margin is the “white space” on the pages of our lives, the room we leave open. If we fill every moment of every day with activity and things, we fail to leave room for the unexpected. We don’t have reserve resources to accept what God might bring into our lives. Sabbath provides a way to maintain margin in the weekly rhythm of our lives. We also need to leave margin in our daily plans as part of making room for God.

One of the keys to building margin into our holiday schedules is to be realistic about what we can do within a matter of a few weeks. Talk with your family, asking them what matters most in their minds. When our children still lived at home, in early November I would ask them “what do you really want to do that will mean Christmas to you?” Sometimes the answer was a particular food they wanted to enjoy, an activity we would do together, or a holiday television special they looked forward to watching. We would decide on those things that mattered the most to them, and then let some of the others go.

Initiate the same conversation with your church leaders. Does anyone still care if we hand out boxes of candy to the kids after the Sunday School program? Are the angel costumes for the preschool class worth all the work? In one congregation where my husband served as pastor, several people insisted we have a Christmas Eve service. So our first Christmas in that church, Keith prepared a lovely service for Christmas Eve—and only five people came. The ones who had insisted on it did not come because they had family events planned! Our second Christmas with that congregation, our whole family planned the Christmas Eve service and the same small group attended. The next year we all decided early not to schedule a service on the night before Christmas.

Consider what you do for others. The same people that didn’t come to church on Christmas Eve jumped at the opportunity to care for others through the Angel Tree ministry. Thirty to forty people bought gifts and wrapped them for the children of incarcerated adults and attended a party to which we invited the children to give them the gifts. We found what really mattered to our people and we showed God’s love to some hurting families in the process. That sounds like preparing room for God to me.
Consider a few questions in creating margin in your holiday schedule:

• Does it have to happen in December? Perhaps you can have that neighborhood get-together in January, or March. Allow the Christmas season to remind you of the people you’d like to get together with, but schedule the parties later on. Most of us would appreciate some holiday cheer in the midst of a gray February day.

• Why do I do what I do? As pastors, we must examine our goals. Do we honestly believe God wants us to have a choir program done in full Biblical costume with a 30-piece orchestra, or do we simply want to do a bigger show than the Baptist church on the corner?

Now that you have the most important things on your calendar, including a healthy amount of margin, you can happily fill in the rest of the time with whatever Christmas preparations, ministry, and activities you choose!

As we create margin in our lives, we prepare our hearts to celebrate the advent, or coming, of the Christ Child. We also create room for others to celebrate with us. Then in January, and for years to come, we’ll be able to look back on Advent 2008 and know that we truly prepared room for Christ’s coming to us and that we have welcomed Christ’s presence in our lives.

Dr. Judi Schwanz is the Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri.