Discerning Weariness from Woundedness (Featuring Glenn Packiam)

0:00Welcome to the Contemplar pastor. In today's conversation, J. Kim interviews Glenn Pachiem, who is a pastor, an author, and songwriter, who serves as the lead pastor of Rock Harbor Church in Costa Mesa, California. In this conversation, J. and Glenn talk about a wide range of topics, sustaining a deeply rooted life with God, remaining faithful when ministry becomes painful, and the relationships and practices that help pastors move toward healing and wholeness and resilience over a lifetime. And as we enter this time, I take a moment to slow down in make room, to breathe, to settle, to notice God's presence here with me. Spirit of God gather my attention, and quiet my hurry. May this conversation become a place of encounter,

1:03where my heart is awakened, my mind renewed, and my life gently formed in the way of Jesus. I know a lot of people listening know you and know your word, but there's probably many who don't. And I tell people all the time, Glenn is this wild unicorn of a pastor. You, seriously, you're like this prolific songwriter worship leader, but then your public intellectual and a barn of fellow, and you write a bunch of books. A lot of people don't know this. You're an ordained Anglican priest, and yet you lead a large church in Orange County that is not Anglican. It's like, you're like my wildest friend. And so I want to start with this question, I mean, I too feel like I sometimes am a bunch of different things

2:06to a bunch of different people in a bunch of different settings. And yet, because of our friendship, what I know of you, is you're one of the most grounded people and leaders that I've ever known. How do you navigate such varied expressions of pastoral leadership while at the same time maintaining sort of singular integrated sense of identity? Yeah, I mean, you know, we're all unique by God's grace and God's design. And I think sometimes the various parts of who we are feel like that integrated unity. And sometimes they feel like a fragmented tension. And I, that's my experience of myself even, you know, is I think sometimes I feel like, oh, yeah, there's a coherence to this. And other times I think this, I am at war within myself, you know, some of those things you've named biographically or whatever, they've happened in different seasons of my life and different areas of my life.

3:06But what I love about, you know, that phrase Parker Palmer uses of listening to your life, I think, you know, the idea of paying attention to the thread, when I have taken the time at guided retreats and things like that to pay attention to the thread of my life, I think my whole life has been about, trying to answer the Father's longing for worshipers who worship Him in spirit and in truth. And so part of that in spirit thing is there's an experiential dimension to this. God is not static, God is not distant, God is not cold or indifferent. And then part of the truth thing is this love for theology, but really a love for the Bible and a love for this. So as a preacher, I'm trying to lead people to an encounter moment. I'm trying to lead people to a place where they go, I see God now. And this is how I want to respond to. And that's worship leading, worship leading at its best. I think Matt Redmond said it is revelation and response, you know. And so that's what I, that's what I was trying to do when I used music as to and they facilitate a revelation and facilitate a response or at least set the table for a revelation

4:08and then facilitate a response. This is what I'm trying to do with preaching. And the Anglican bit is the same thing. The liturgy is yet another way to kind of lay down a trail for people to have a moment of encounter, have a moment of revelation and then have a response of surrender, adoration, worship, service and more. What you're saying makes me think of these different sort of visuals of guides. My daughter just, but she's just, she's getting into middle school this year. So she just went on her first middle school camp like a few weeks ago as a recording this. And they went whitewater rafting while she was, she was just telling me about how incredible whitewater rafting was. And you know, obviously they had a guide. And then the very next day they did canyon nearing, which was just hiking through these canyons. And then they had a different guide. And then the last day they did this sort of rock climbing, you know, bouldering and rock climbing. And they had a different guide. And as I was listening to her explain, each sort of experience was very different.

5:13But the way she was describing these guides, their kindness, their gentleness, their patience, like, oh, they're different people guiding you through different trails. But they're doing the same sort of work. And that's so helpful to me to think about it that way as a pastor, that whatever expression I'm embodying in a particular context, really, I'm doing the same work. I'm guiding people toward an encounter of God by His Spirit, the risen Christ who is among us. I want to get a little more granular, you know, again, just in your practices of maintaining this singular integrated sense of identity. Are there like, you know, one or two maybe specific spiritual practices that you've personally found, like most helpful for cultivating that sort of deep, hidden, non-public life with God amongst amid all of the, you know, very public demands of your pastoral ministry?

6:13I mean, I just want to acknowledge to people who are listening to this, obviously, like, this is very, very difficult. And I don't think I have not achieved mastery in this, you know, and I want people to know this is a complicated thing. And my own story of being an immigrant coming to America, first at a young age, then moving back to Malaysia, and then returning for college as an international student, you know, at 17. My own story has marked me with a wound that slowly heals, but the scab is still there of feeling like an outsider. And so sometimes the parts of who I am accentuate that feeling, or touch on that scab a little bit. So I have written things in my journal like I'm too liturgical for my charismatic friends, I'm too charismatic for my liturgical friends, I'm too academic for my evangelicals, and I'm too evangelistic for my academic friends, you know, and everybody, every one of us, I think, could write some version of this,

7:15because we are a composition, a composite, a mosaic of all these different influences and threads, but I think God is in it. So for me, there are some practices of negation, if you will, like practices of cutting out. And I have to use the brick app on my phone to block social media at throughout the work day, and at certain times in the night. In fact, here's a true confession real time. Over the summer, you know, I actually turned the brick off, because I was like, I wanted to keep up on NBA free agency news. I just had to be tuned into my Denver Nuggets J. I had to know, you know, like, what's going? So I was obsessively scrolling to it. And just today, I was like, it's time to put the brick back on and lock this thing out, because what would happen is I would see, you know, what other people are saying in this particular arena, and I go, oh, maybe I should say a bit more of that, or maybe I should be, that the parts of who you are are like these overlapping circles that connect in a beautiful mosaic,

8:18but each of those circles can overlap with another circle, you know, they, and so then you go, oh, maybe I should lean more there, or maybe I should lean more there, or maybe I should lean more there. And each of those tensions is actually pulling me apart. It's fragmenting me, because I'm, there is a Venn diagram where they all overlap, and that is me. And then there are the outer edges that could push toward other circles, and I want to go there. So there are some disciplines of negation or practices of negation where I go, no, I'm not going to do that. And then there's the positive practices, which for me have to do with first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I lay in bed for a little bit when I first wake up, and I just start talking to the Lord. I just start saying thank you, Jesus. Here I am, Lord, and it's not set phrases, but I just become aware of God's presence, and just start acknowledging Him, asking for help. And then I do that again at night. Thank you, Lord. I love you, you know. And then those bookends actually shaped my practice throughout the day. I, early on in life, maybe in my high school years,

9:21I came across the idea of practicing the presence of God by, you know, by the Lawrence. And that is very much a habit for me, and spare moments throughout my work day in the car at a stoplight. Between meetings, just deep breath. And it's not even so formal as a breath prayer. Like, oh, yeah, I'm saying the same thing. It is, but it also is much more like often I'm just saying, Lord help. Lord, thank you, Lord, I need you, Lord, give me clarity today, Lord. Keep me from being, you know, reacting, you know, to these conversations, Lord, keep me from pride or pettiness, you know, all those kinds of things that go with me throughout the day. I think for me part of remaining whole is both the things I will not do and the things that I will do. Yeah, it's a really helpful paradigm. You know, I've heard you talk about seasons of your life and particular practices being such helpful, seasonally helpful.

10:24So as an example, you know, your worship leader and a preacher. And I've heard you talk about in seasons of your life where worship leading musically was a significant part of your ministry life. How the practice of meditating on scripture was so helpful to booey you and then kind of reverse, you know, in your preaching life, you have discovered man losing yourself in music has been such a helpful practice. Talk a little bit about that. How, because I think a lot of times we get sort of locked into I have to and then fill in the blank. Yes. So talk about the sort of seasonality of practices. It's very hard to drink water out of the well that I'm serving others a drink from. And what that means is, you know, when you're doing this as part of your job, it's also hard to then receive from it, you know, contemporary worship music is wonderful. It's meant to evoke our emotions. It's meant to help us express our emotions.

11:26But sometimes it can be overly centered on emotions. And I in those years, I really needed something that was less dependent on my emotional state to put it frankly. And so I found the contemplative practices to be so helpful to me, praying the Psalms, even the set prayers from the book of common prayer, the Anglican book of common prayer. That was the early beginning of the Anglican journey for me. And it's not that they they're unemotional. It's that they're unreliant on my emotions. And that is, that was helpful to me. And then in other seasons like now, we're, or actually, you know, let's talk about the season when I was doing my academic work. I was so immersed in the research and the writing my dissertation and all this stuff. And I'm like, if I read another book or if I read a chapter of the book, like this is going to be tough. So I needed, I needed a different way of seeing God and nature was a part of that. Music was a part of that. Again, you know, so I think seasonality is such an important thing with our life with God.

12:32And long, long friendships, long marriages are all like this. They have been floated. We don't keep doing the same date nights or the same, you know, let's have, you know, some routine is good. Gosh, there is a vast array of pathways to intimacy that are available to us on a human level and certainly in a divine connection. I love the image of date nights, you know, it I love my wife. I love Jenny, but it would get quite wrote if we just went to the same restaurant and watched the same movie all the time. So I love the freedom in that that as as pastors, we need to in different seasons probably find what we need most in terms of practices that help us get to the same place, which is union with God and the deep hidden parts of our lives. I want to I want to linger there a bit more that the sort of deep hidden parts of our lives early in your ministry life.

13:33You were a part of a church that was large and growing and everything was fast and they were demanding expectations. And in that season, you met Eugene Peterson. And you've written about how formative your time with him was over the years, you described it as slow work that took root in your heart. So I want to go back to that time. If you can, maybe reflect a bit on the initial ache you felt in that season that led you to seeking Eugene Peterson and then talk a bit about how just his influence on you, you know, continues his work continues to shape your your philosophy of pastoral ministry. I joined the staff team of this church in Colorado, new life church. I was mostly in the worship world, but then I started to we started to launch like the school of worship. We started recording music. We started traveling and it honestly did a lot for my vanity and ego is a 20 something. And then it all came crashing down the founding senior pastor had a very, very public moral failure in late 2006.

14:40And it brought about this catalytic moment for me. It was, you know, there was a sense of like, oh my gosh, how could he? But very quickly, the Holy Spirit began to put almost like the finger of God's conviction on my own heart to go. And what about you? You know, and I realized that I was confusing ministry success with the blessing of God. I realized that I was confusing influence with the mission of God. They're not always the same thing. And and so I had I went into this this moment of refining it. So God, what what about my heart? Where am I prone to chase the wrong things or confuse these things? And that's when I began reading Eugene Peterson. And ironically it began because I read the message paraphrase of the book of Job and it really wrecked me. I was like, man, this is it because Job says at the end, I use I've been living off a rumors of you. Now I have it all firsthand with my own eyes and ears. And then I started reading the contemplative pastor. I started reading under the unpredictable plant, which is book his book about, you know, the holiness of our vocation, our calling, no matter what our vocation is. I read, working the angles, which I really love about the inner life of the pastor, not just preaching teaching and administration. He talks about it like the straight lines of a triangle that those obvious things, but the inner angles are what give our pastoral calling its shape.

16:07I think it's prayer study and spiritual direction. And and I was so deeply impacted by these books and it it he kept saying over and over again, pastoral ministry is personal, it's local. You've got to know the soil of the people that you're you're working with. And I felt like I honestly felt dissolution. I was like, I can't do this in a in a mega church setting. I can't do this in the larger maybe I need to leave my father law, you know, as farmer, I'm like maybe I need to move to Iowa. And like be a country priest, you know, like I don't know what do I do. And mercifully a friend of mine, he had been a literary agent for me early on and was Eugene's agent. It reached I reached out to him and I said, could I write to Eugene? I know he does sometimes correspond. So I wrote a letter to Eugene, like just pouring out my heart, talking about my existential vocational crisis, you know, like what do I do? And he was so gracious. He said, you can come and spend a few days with me. And I thought, wow. So I went with a friend of mine, a ministry colleague of mine named Aaron Stern, one of my really good friends. And Aaron and I went in the summer of 2010.

17:16And we spent two and a half days, two nights in their home Eugene and Jan's home off of flathead lake in Montana. And it was profound on so many levels. But one of the things he said. It was there are no ideal conditions in which to live out this vocation. And that set me free. Because I think for so many of us wrestling with angst, we go, my pace, my pace is off, my board is a problem, my denomination is a problem, my city is a problem, my country is a problem, you know. And Eugene goes, there are no ideal conditions in which to be a pastor. And he talked about how his mom was kind of a penicostal, itinerant preacher. And he was like, but I'm not really penicostal. And then he's like, but I was in the press for tear and shirts, but I'm not really fully press for tear, you know. And he described being a misfit. And of course that resonated with me, this idea of being a misfit and embracing that there are no ideal conditions in which to live out this vocation. But he said the question is, can you have, do you have a little corner, a little patch of your world where you can try to faithfully be the pastor God has called you to be.

18:30And even to just encourage people listening, my friend Aaron, his conclusion was it's time to leave, you know, and he went off to plant an amazing church in Northern Colorado. My conclusion was I need to stay and help care for these people. And I had a little patch of soil there to tend. So there's not a one size fits all kind of answer to this, but I take Eugene's wisdom, I carry it with me for years and years. So before we continue on in this rich conversation, we want to create a moment to pause here for just a little reflection. So I want to invite you to take a slow breath. Just allow yourself to become present. To what God might be doing, to your experience in this moment of listening to these two pastors discuss. Glenn shared Eugene Peterson's reminder that there are no ideal conditions in which to live out our calling. And we are invited to faithfully tend the little patch of soil God has entrusted us with.

19:39Nothing that's a perfect moment to pause and reflect, a perfect image to picture that patch of soil now. Who are the people God has placed in your care? What place or community or work has been entrusted to you? And just begin to notice whether comparison or restlessness has made it difficult to receive this particular place as a gift. The goal is just to notice what's happening in you. What God might be inviting you into. So quietly ask God, where are you inviting me to be more present? What would faithfulness look like here? Not someday when circumstances were different, when people were different, when I am different, but today. And just in that midst begin to notice what comes up for you. Remain still for a moment in listen.

20:41Let this just become a place of prayer. Lord, free us from the search for perfect conditions, from the shame of not being good enough. Give us grace to love the people before us. Tend what you have entrusted to us and be faithful in this place today. I want to dig just one layer deeper because you just mentioned that for Aaron, his call was to leave and now God's doing amazing things through his leadership. And for you for a long time, the call was to stay. And people who don't know the story, there was a tragic shooting on the campus of the church. I mean, it was you were serving a traumatized, a significantly traumatized community. And yet you stayed because you felt called to stay.

21:41What did you learn in that season of staying because my assumption, Glenn, is probably on a daily basis, you wondered, should I go? Like this is so hard, you know, so what did you learn in that season, that dark valley about staying? Yeah, I mean, the shooting happened 13 months after the scandal. So it was a short, a compressed timeframe. And you used to wear a trauma and we don't use it lightly. I think that genuinely is true. So many of the staff went to counseling after the shooting and tragically two teenage girls lost their lives that day. We honor them. We remember them. We grieve at their family. And when the staff went to counseling, what was interesting is what they wanted to talk about was the scandal 13 months earlier, more than they wanted to talk about the shooting. And that, you know, there's people smarter than me who can unpack how trauma works, you know, but sometimes there's a deeper wound that gets covered over or adrenaline masks.

22:41So I think when you stay, you have to stay longer than the adrenaline rush of survival, you know, there is a survival mode in which you're carried through it. You got to stay long enough to where things achieve some level of quote unquote normalcy because it's a normalcy that you begin to realize, here's where I'm wounded. And this is the thing, you know, this is the thing even for pastors, the work that I do with Barna on, on, on pastoral resilience and all of that. All of the data post COVID were like, oh, they're, you know, there hasn't moved that much. And then all of a sudden two years after the pandemic, it was like, boom, the spike of pastors who are deeply discouraged and would quit. If they could quit, you know, and some people go, well, why, why would you say that in 2022, the pandemic's over or whatever, you know, and I think the answer is it's the way PTSD works on an actual sense. And then the way, whether we call it micro PTSD or PTSD like things work is it's not in the battle that you feel the triggers. It's after it's when you're in line at Walmart, it's when you're in traffic on the freeway.

23:46That's when you start to go, whoa, and for us in church work, it's actually when the church is growing and it's actually when people come back and you're like, oh, no, oh, no, and you start hope finding yourself holding your breath going, uh, uh, uh, when's the next thing, when's the next shoe going to drop. And so in staying, we learned that we need that part of healing was actually learning to do normal life in a healthy way. Resilience is one part recovery, but it's one part recalibration. You got to change some things about your life. You got to change some things about your rhythms. Yeah, recovery and recalibration, I think, I've heard you talk about that before and it's been such a helpful paradigm. And for me, as your friend, and having had the opportunity over the last several years to see very up close, um, the work that you are doing now at rock harbor. This is a beautiful church in Orange County with a beautiful story. Um, what's interesting is rock harbor is a large church. It's a large evangelical church in a very busy city with people living very busy lives and chasing leisure and all of the challenges that many pastors leading in those types of contexts face and yet.

25:05I've watched you and continue to watch you lead in such a way that you don't compromise the sort of work that God wants to do through this large church while at the same time maintaining all the stuff you've just talked about. One of the thoughts that comes to mind is when you stepped into the lead role at rock harbor, a number of years ago, you took this like radical approach, you started setting up meetings with every single person on the team. And you were diagnosing through relationship and conversation, you know, where they were experiencing. I think these are your words, wearingness and woundedness, which is such a radical approach to leading a large church. So talk about, you know, where that instant came from. And then as you reflect back, especially as you think about the pastors and leaders who are listening to this, why did you take that approach? Would you take it again? And what's the thought behind it? Yeah, if someone asked me and I it's been four years now, I feel like, you know, I had a friend told me that a consultant told him that your one is orientation, you're learning, your two is, you know, experimentation, you're trying a few things, what's in you, what do you want to put your imprint on your three's evaluation, you go, well, what worked, what didn't admit your failures, that kind of thing. And then your four is acceleration. So you finally feel like you turned the corner.

26:27And the way I would say it now, if I was talking to someone taking over a church, is I would say vision come second vision come second and don't believe it. Everybody's going to tell you, what's your vision? What's your vision? Everybody's going to be asking you, what's our vision? What's your vision come second health comes first vision comes second health comes first. And if the church is not healed or healthy or moving towards health, no amount of vision is going to you're just going to get a bunch of limping wounded people racing towards a target. That's not what you want, you know. And so and so taking the time and I was given a great gift in this that my official like installation service was in October, but they, but they brought me on the team in September. And so I was given this gift of being able to be behind the scenes without writing sermons every week. And so I sat, took the opportunity, my wife and I both in different ways, I sat down with every staff member, she sat down with every female on the team or the wife of someone on the team. And we asked him some basic questions about tell, tell me about your faith journey. Tell me about your, you know, the sense of your calling towards ministry in general and rock harbors specifically. Tell me what you think of the fit that you have here. Tell me about the future that you imagine, you know.

27:39And some of them had a lot of clarity about that. Some of them didn't and that was okay, but all of them cried. And that was what arrested me. All of them cried in the meeting. And I, it was then that I began to parse out of discern, oh, some of you are crying because there's a sheer exhaustion. There's just weariness. And then some of you are crying because you're wounded. You're wounded by the words of others by the perceptions of others or whatever. And so for me, the language of woundedness versus weariness is so helpful. Because if you're wounded, no amount of rest or sabbaticals are going to solve it. You need a, you need a therapist, you need someone to help you heal properly, drain the someone who can drain the poison and dress the wound. You need healing. If you're weary, yes, you do need extended rest, you do need better, better rhythms of rest. There's ways around that. But they're not the same thing. And I've seen this time and time again in my own life. I've seen this with the leaders all on our team. I've seen this. It pastors, I talked to the resident with it.

28:40Jay, I've even had the opportunity to share some of this content with secular business leaders, marketplace entrepreneurs. And this one guy almost like had this like shouting moment on a Zoom call like, wow, that's the inside. And he said, I've just come back from like a four month adventure expedition. I was riding elephants in Thailand, praying in temples in India. And he's like, I'm no better than I was before I left, you know. And he goes, I'm realizing I wasn't weary. I'm wounded by, you know, clients or for me. And former colleagues who took my come took my clients and betrayed me, you know, that that is a different level of of a diagnosis. You know, if I trace back in the conversation we've had so far, you've mentioned several different people, but you've mentioned several different types of people. It's one of the things that has been such a gift to me as I have born witness to your personal and pastoral life. And these sort of unique relationships that you are able to hold with such grace and a sort of mutuality that I find so beautiful. But you've done some work that has been paradigm shifting for me and for people on our team that I would love for pastors to just hear a bit about.

30:05You talk about the tendency amongst all people, but especially church leaders and pastors to sort of in our loneliness because it is a lonely endeavor to desperately seek that sort of one perfect person to be our, you know, be all and all sort of friend. But you've done this wonderful work on what you call a constellation of relationships and you've already described it. So for folks who are not familiar with that, talk about that. What do you mean by a constellation of relationships? And then maybe in your experience with other pastors, you know, are there any within that constellation that seemed to be most commonly missing in pastors lives? So years ago, I picked up a book by Paul Stanley and Robert Clinton called Connecting and it was all about relationships and there was this one phrase that jumped off the page to me and has stuck with me ever since and they said, we make the mistake of looking for one North star when we actually we need a constellation.

31:05And that was it. And I all of a sudden I got it and so much of our search is for the one best friend or the one mentor or the one protege or the one co worker and we call that's going to solve it all. And maybe in church work, we think, well, you know, Paul had Barnabas or you know, so and so and so there or he had Timothy. And so we reduce it even to like just that one person. But actually I started to reflect about what kinds of relationships do we need in our constellation? And I don't think this is exhaustive, but I do think it's a great start. And so let me name some of them. One, you do need a sage in your life and a sage is a person who can offer you wisdom at key crossroads in your life. Now for people who love Lord of the Rings, the metaphor tracks it maps pretty cleanly over it. That's a Gandalf type of figure, you know. So I don't I don't think you necessarily live in the same town as your sage. It may be, but they're the person that you pick up the phone or you know text them whatever you set up a call call.

32:09And it's it's it's it's strategic conversations with the sage. Secondly, there's an authority figure. This is a person who can it's the truth teller and in Lord of the Rings, this is aroggorn. He's the rightful king, you know, the return of the king. And then and then you need a healer, which I named earlier with the idea of being wounded and a healer could be a therapist could be a spiritual director, but it's a trained professional who can actually help you pay attention to your soul. And I think you need a healer every day. I don't think you need a healer in every season, but I do think there are seasons where you go. I need a healer to help bring to attention. What's going on in my inner life that I can't see. And then the other two are these are the ones that I think are worth differentiating. I think we need peers and we need companions. So a peer is someone who's in the same role as you, but different context. So like you and me, Jay, like we're both in the same role, but we're in different context. A companion is different role, but same context, meaning they live here. They're in your city. You can go on a bike ride with them. You can go on a walk with them.

33:16And they don't you don't have to talk to them about your job, but you might go watch a ballgame together or you might, you know, and I think I think that's that's another important piece. Now, you asked what do pastors often have missing in their life? The data from Barnett says that we are number one, we're missing the healer role in our life. Very few pastors see a counselor therapist or spiritual director for any kind of trained help. Now, I'm not, I'm not pushing therapy on everybody, but I do think it's important for people who are in positions of care. And I, you know, I have, for me, I have seen a spiritual director for many, many years. There have been a few moments where I've seen a counselor. I am in a season where I'm praying, Lord, is it time to reengage one of those, you know, in my life. So it's not a constant. It could be seasonal, but pastors typically very, very few pastors, you know, have a healer in their life. And then secondly, very few pastors have true companions.

34:17There's something about a relationship that has no power dynamic to it that has no, I don't see you as the pastor or, you know, this sort of other role where there's a humanness to our connection. And I don't mean worldliness or carnality. I mean, the human pleasure of the joys of life, whether that's enjoying a meal or whatever. But my hope is that you know, name some of these pieces of the constellation. Man, Glenn, I am, as I'm listening to you talk about that, I'm just, I'm so grateful that God brought you into my constellation of relationships and say, you're, I mean, way beyond just this conversation. I'm grateful for all the insights and wisdom you've shared here for pastors and church leaders, but I'm just so grateful for your friendship as we sort of wrap up this conversation. You know, keeping in mind, maybe the pastors who are listening and maybe they're weary today or maybe they're wounded.

35:25Maybe it's all sort of a fog and they can't even really quite tell the difference right now. They just know that they're hurting or they're feeling alone just keeping that leader in mind. Would you just give us a final word of encouragement and blessing? Yeah, I just want to say to you that Jesus sees you that he knows and to your woundedness, he shows you his own wounds and says, put your hands on these wounds. Like he says to Thomas. And to your wearyness, he says, come onto me, all you are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. And I just want to pray that, you know, for you that you would know, you know, that you would know the gentleness of our shepherd who makes you lie down in green pastures, who leads you beside quiet waters, who stores your soul. I pray that you would know the suffering servant who is a man of sorrows and acquainted with our griefs.

36:29And I pray that even through these things, the weiriness and the woundedness and all that, that you would come to know Jesus, that you would know Him in both the fellowship of His sufferings and the power of His resurrection, that the goal is not for us to be successful pastors, the goal is for us to love and know Jesus. Amen.