When I started building my course structure for the pastoral care course the other day, I started thinking about problems. What are the problem situations where people “need” a pastor?

I put need in quotes. Many people have no ongoing felt need of a pastor.

Sometimes they feel a need for a chaplain, thought that’s a mixed thing, too.

The other day, one of my chaplain friends was told he wasn’t needed, that, in this person’s experience, which was pretty tragic, “God is a liar.” The next day, I was standing outside a hospital room talking with one daughter when the other daughter arrived, looked at me, and began to sob. We had been talking, the first sister and I, about getting a military family member back for a visit. But I understand the message often conveyed by the “chaplain” badge. As a patient said one day when I introduced myself, “I didn’t know it was that bad!”

After thinking about the problems, and about the reaction to chaplains, I wrote on the whiteboard, thinking about the course, “Stop making it about problems!”

What if pastoral care is more about helping people find and make meaning at times of transition, and the times in between, and doing so by intentionally but not intrusively from a spiritual perspective? So there is an intersection around birth as well as death, around career change as well as job loss, about daily life as well as about events.

To help all of us, I think I’ll write a day in the life, or a week in the life, of a pastor who has a clear and growing understanding of “pastoral care as the all-inclusive work of the pastor.”

I’ve got good source material in some pastors who I’ve known who cared about people. Ray and Clyde and Jim, for example. And I’ve got the conversations I’ve had in and out of the hospital. There’s also a wonderful resource in the movie from the restaurant people. And there’s this story of Matt Canlis, who learned to live at Godspeed.