What Doesn’t Kill You

“You know that phrase, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?’ What if… what doesn’t kill you… just doesn’t kill you. Maybe it has nothing to do with making you strong.”

My friend Ann dropped this truth bomb, while we were on a shared walk recently. Ann is one of the rare gifts I have been honored to receive since moving to Oakland, California, from Holland, Michigan, two years ago – a good friend. Ann and I grew up together in small town Fremont, Michigan, in the 1980’s. After high school, she moved to the Bay Area for graduate school and never left. She launched a career, started a family, and has been generous enough to pursue a friendship with me all these years later, despite being exceptionally busy. What a joy to find someone whom I not only share history with, but also an affinity for dark ideas, like the one she thought aloud above.

As we huffed up one of the legendary hills that mark the landscape of the East Bay – well I huffed, Ann practically skipped – we talked about self-care. More and more it seems like pastors can’t chat with each other without talking about the ways they are or are not caring for their bodies, minds, and spirits. While Ann is a writer and teacher and not a pastor, her own career and family journey has tested her emotional and physical limits. Life is hard, the pandemic made it harder still, and most people with whom I have spoken have not fully recovered from the age of Corona. Pastors and others in helping fields have been especially slow to recover.

When I was a student at Western Theological Seminary ten years ago, there was much discussion regarding the high burnout rates of pastors. That worry has only heightened during the pandemic. A 2022 study done by Barna asked pastors about their job satisfaction and 42% admitted that they had seriously considered leaving ministry in the past year. They named loneliness, isolation, and political divisions as the most pressing reasons. I, for one, am grateful that my seminary took this seriously and dedicated much encouragement and education to the subject of self-care. We were held accountable to practices such as:

• Exercise.
• Prayer.
• Retreats.
• Eating Well.
• Limiting alcohol consumption.
• Meditation.
• Therapy.
• Pastoral coaching.
• Spiritual Direction.
• Hobbies.
• Finding a supportive community.
• Carving out personal Sabbath.

The list was so long, I wondered how pastors actually found time to get any work done.

With pastoral care, worship planning and administrative tasks during the day followed by committee meetings in the evenings, my first pastoral call was an adjustment. But I figured ways to find work life balance. My husband, who is a theatre artist and professor, also had similar time demands, so our daily dinners together moored us. We tried to be done with day demands by 3, so that we could make and share a meal together before running off to our evening obligations. It worked well.

As a second-career pastor, I was grateful to be starting ministry with my kids already grown. I observed my pastoral colleagues nurturing young families with compassion, but also with a shudder. Trying to raise kids while raising pledges for next year’s budget sounded exhausting. At any rate, I did the healthy things. I ate nutritious foods. I found a pastoral coach. I watched the alcohol consumption. I even trained for a 10K.

But six years into ministry, the pandemic hit, and the virus was villainous. People I knew died; most of them were pastors. Images of refrigerated trucks holding bodies outside hospital morgues instead of lettuce and milk for restaurants filled my Facebook newsfeed. Even before the pandemic, my ministry prioritized those vulnerable because of their mental health. The virus complicated everything: the isolation created by the pandemic was just as deadly as the virus. As if caring for exceptionally vulnerable folks wasn’t anxiety producing enough, my work rhythms were flipped upside down. There was a new list to check:

• Create brand new ways to worship.
• Create brand new ways to lead youth group.
• Create brand new ways to have a Bible study.
• Create brand new ways to offer pastoral care.
• Create brand new ways to articulate my speech through a KN95 mask.
• Create brand new ways to make people feel part of a community in a 14-inch lap top screen.

There was so much creating going on, I wished I could clone a helpmate from one of my ribs to share the workload. Almost overnight, there was about 30% more work to do, with about 30% less energy to do it. Of course, I was not alone. All of us were thrown into a season of reinvention and a deepened need for community. But for those of us who needed to not only care for ourselves and families, but also for others, the season felt like an eternal winter. Many of us are still looking for signs of spring, but the daffodils blackened before they could bloom. Even now a few years later, many of us have not recovered. I know I have not. I took really good care of myself during the pandemic, yet these are my struggles:

• Never ending exhaustion.
• Never-ending guilt, because I feel I should be “over it” by now.
• Never-ending temptation to compare myself to 2019 Beth – that person for whom running a 10K and processing in therapy every two weeks was enough to keep me on the path of health.
• Never enough time to work.
• Never enough time to play.

There are just too many never enoughs.

What if… what doesn’t kill you… just doesn’t kill you. Maybe it has nothing to do with making you strong.

Two years ago, my family and I packed up our belongings and moved to Oakland, where I took a call as a senior pastor at a small church. When I accepted the call, it was with some internal caution. The pandemic had been challenging and I was only a year and a half away from a much-needed sabbatical, the first of my career. However, I was presented with the opportunity to lead a church, invest in a staff, and dream together with a consistory. It was not lost on me that senior pastor positions are few and far between for women. Only about 14% of senior pastors are women and I was one of the lucky ones. If not now, would I ever be afforded another opportunity like this?

Though there were cracks in my carefully cultivated work-life balance, I felt my vocational path was converging at this moment. Theologically, I believe that our creative and redemptive God recycles our positive and negative experiences alike, and channeling my past vocational experience from the corporate sector into ministry seemed just that. My first career in business management was empowering me to lead a faith organization. What a privilege to now mentor and shape others in a church! Though I was flirting with burnout myself, I trusted that my safety net of self-care would hold me.

Oakland City Church (OCC) is a beautiful church community. It is also a complex place. Our vision statement, “People who don’t belong together gathered around Jesus for the sake of those who don’t belong,” both inspires and challenges. It is a lifestyle of constant navigation and compromise; sometimes we are faithful, sometimes we are not. But God is a constant source of encouragement and nourishment on our shared journey.

The pandemic was not kind to the Bay Area and OCC took an attendance wallop. Like many churches, OCC was a victim of the great Covid migration, going from weekly attendance of over 200 down to double digits by the time I arrived.

People in Northern California are transient, and if you watch the news you know housing is exorbitant. The San Francisco Bay area is filled with young, single, tech nomads who migrate through corporate giants and startups alike for several years before moving to more affordable cities once it comes time to start families. The pandemic was an accelerant. Not wanting to be alone, the tech nomads fled to their out-of-state families. This was easy: they were the pioneers who opened the ability for all of us to work remotely. As a result, The whole region shrunk by a quarter million people in just two years.

When I arrived, the people who remained at my church were resilient and dedicated; but they were also exhausted and grieving. As if adjusting to the pandemic wasn’t issue enough, two pastors left, including their founding pastor. The elder board, staff, and volunteers rose to the occasion, creating brand new ways to worship and brand-new ways to clearly speak through a KN95 mask with the best of them. But working your regular job in a pandemic, coupled with a new volunteer position, on top of leading a senior pastor search, is next-level anxiety. They needed a senior pastor yesterday, even as I needed a break last week.

I took the call.

The story that we all told ourselves, sometimes out loud but mostly as internal pep talks, was that simply getting a living, breathing, senior pastor in place was the answer to our problems. Want the people to come back to church? Get the new pastor. Want giving to bounce back? Get the new pastor. Want everything to go back to normal? Just get the new pastor. Such stories might be good for coaxing tired minds and bodies, but they are terrible at setting yourselves up for success. And to be clear, our definition of success would need to be divergent, even unconventional—not something defined by attendance or growth, but something new—something holier, something surprising, something beautiful, but something that would demand that we live in liminal space for days, months, and years, if we wanted to thrive.

They were drained and I was overworked—yet somehow we are still here. We are still standing. We still belong together, even if we sometimes don’t think that we do. One of our themes of this past year was rest, using the book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, by Tricia Hersey, as a guide. Rest is not sexy. Rest doesn’t create slick worship spaces or help you articulate your speech through a KN95 mask. But you know what rest does do? It settles frayed nerves. It helps you communicate better. It reminds you that your Christian identity is rooted in belonging to God and each other. Rest, I believe, even helps you create community, as it attracts other weary pilgrims looking for a soft place to sit in a city that anchors its identity in upward motion.

I wish I had an easy message for you, just as I wish the same for myself. This essay is not a “follow these six simple steps to be refreshed and renewed for ministry.” Things are still hard. I haven’t yet rebuilt my community. I miss my adult son, my parents, and my close friends who are still in Michigan. I miss the feeling of being trusted by people have known me for so many years and witnessed my heart and integrity. There are no shortcuts in earning trust. My church is still small and there are those who have left since I started, even as there are new folks who have started attending.

Though I do use my business and administrative experiences in my church work, I feel like I don’t know what I am doing most of the time. But what I do know is this:

• Keep praying.
• Keep walking.
• Keep playing.
• Keep breathing.
• Keep pausing.
• Keep resting.
• Keep loving my people.
• Keep stopping to pet my cats.
• Keep eating well.
• Keep talking with my therapist.
• Keep walking with my friend Ann.
• Keep asking questions of my coach.

And because of this, I am still here. I am still standing upright. I am still facing forwards. I don’t feel strong, but I do feel alive.

Liminal spaces stink. They just do. No matter how much you squint you can’t see through the fog. But the more you take care of yourself, the more gratitude you have for being alive for another day. The truth is life isn’t always about thriving, it’s often about surviving.

What if… what doesn’t kill you… just doesn’t kill you? I am learning that this is enough.