Back to the barre

I love Cyberspace. I love that we, ministry professionals, can get together and support each other from miles away with the click of a mouse.

I'm a dancer. I used to be in a ballet/tap/jazz company in Chicago, but moved to Houston and haven't found one here that doesn't think I'm too "old." I still dance, though, and am in an Irish company, but I digress. My point in this, beyond rambling, is that I like the movie Center Stage. At some point in the movie, the dance instructor tells a struggling student that she needs to remember her "home" which is the ballet barre. Whenever she's stressed, she should just go back to the barre.

There is a point to this (I told you I'm nonlinear sometimes), and that is that when things are rough at work, I feel like I can always go back to my home in Cyberspace where I can read others' struggles and solutions and get support from my Crossroads friends or from people I've never met and know only by their blog names.

It's tough being in ministry. I've worked for big corporations like Worldcom, but ministry has it's own set of problems, mainly because you don't expect Christians to behave the same way people do at Worldcom. I guess that's a perception problem on my part, but it is still frustrating. The constant backbiting, the control freaks, the patriarchal leaders who disregard women in ministry, the people who seem to want to completely sabotage children's ministry and the people who seem to forget that we even exist as they stomp all over us, trumping us out of meeting space or money and worse, head pastors who don't have the guts to stand up to the trumpers--all of these can wear you down and make you want to run away screaming. I'm at that point today, if you can't tell. But I know that I can always come back to the barre--back to people who struggle with the same problems and who remind me that I am called to a purpose high above human issues and to discard my tunnel vision, which gets wrapped up in the negatives.

I wish, that at some point, we could all meet up and have a retreat of sorts to get away, share ideas and notes, and support each other in person. Maybe we should.