TALKING WITH PASTOR VINNIE

April 24, 2023April 24, 2023 / joseph elon lillie / 3 Comments

One of the benefits of being connected with our fellowship is the opportunity for intentional spiritual direction.

Having a spiritual director or a spiritual presbyter, as they are called among us, is a new thing for our network. I have always had a presbyter, but the job descriptions of these pastors of pastors has been so broad and the regions they cover so vast it was always very hard to have deep connection with them.

My section is Western MA. I pastor the eastern most western church in a region that stretches from my town on the New Hampshire border all the way to the New York border and south to the Connecticut border. My presbyter pastors a church about an hour and a half from me in Wilbraham MA. He oversees 18 churches over a large territory with a variety of needs in very diverse communities.

My spiritual presbyter, Pastor Vinnie, is from Lynnfield MA. He oversees two pastors as a spiritual presbyter. His job has nothing to do with the running of our churches. His job is to help us personally and spiritually as pastors.

He calls me about once a month to check in. Our calls focus on how my spiritual life is going, what my personal struggles are and how I am doing with the work of God. I love talking with him and praying with him. We are building a relationship of trust and conversational confessional discipline. It is good for my heart and it is new to me as a pastor. I have not had this connection with a pastor before and it feels good. It feel healthy. It feels….hopeful.

My Food Map

April 22, 2023 / joseph elon lillie / 10 Comments

One of my goals this year is to work on my personal health by losing some weight. I have lost about twenty pounds since Christmas and gained back five. Net loss is 15 pounds.

This last month I have struggled to continue the habits I started in January. Of course January kicked off with a vegetarianfast which by nature was time bound. I was never going to keep the pace that I started with. That means I didn’t really start the behavior modification of dieting until February.

I am learning that real ground is only going to be gained if I do the slow work of changing my habits: shifting coffee drinking to water drinking. exercising daily, learning to limit my sweet consumption (not eliminate), learning to fill up on low density foods rather than high density foods, and practicing real meal prep not just microwaving.

Above all I have to change my mindset about food. That means discovering what, when and why I eat. Hence the food map above. I am noticing that many of my calories are taken in when I am tired. I am a late night snacker especially when I watch the tube at the end of the day.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

I don’t know if I can eliminate this behavior, but maybe I can begin to limit it.

WHAT HELPS YOU TO MANAGE YOUR PERSONAL HEALTH?

Little Bits

April 19, 2023 / joseph elon lillie / 5 Comments

I am trying to apply atomic habits to my everyday life to bring about big changes “An atomic habit is a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do but is also the source of incredible power; a component of the system of compound growth.” James Clear .com

One of the atomic habits I am building is spending 20 minutes a day working on the house and yard.

I am trying to put this twenty minutes in either right before I go to mid day prayer or directly after lunch.

The other day I spent my twenty minutes breaking apart the temporary holding gardens I had built two years ago. In twenty minutes I was able to deconstruct the outer hull of these gardens.

On another day I filled in holes around the yard using some of this dirt.

I haven’t succeeded in making this habit a part of everyday life but I will keep practicing until I do.

WHAT ARE SOME THINGS YOU DO TO BUILD POSITIVE HABITS?

IT IS APPOINTED

April 15, 2023 / joseph elon lillie / 3 Comments

Hebrews 9:27 states, ” it is appointed for men to die once.”

My dear friend and ward Grace passed from this life into eternity last night. I had just visited her in the morning. She was tired and a bit confused but we had a nice visit before she went off for a midmorning nap.

Is this grief I feel? It is not sadness really. I find it hard to be sad for her. I know where she is now and I know she has entered into a new life, an eternal life, which she had lived all of this life waiting for.

I feel an empty space in my heart where a connection once dwelt. It is a connection I had for nearly forty years. It is a connection I know I will have again when I make my own journey to where she is. But it is a connection that for now is severed. If that is a sense of grief, then I guess I am grieving. It is: A divine sense of emptiness; A reminder that God is brining us into a spacious place if we follow where He leads; Not sadness just an empty sort of hope and joy.

Photo by Sebastian Palomino on Pexels.com

I wonder, what angel came to take Grace home? What was her first glimpse of Heaven beyond the veil of Earth? What is she feeling now in her new body in her opened mind? I doubt she is living with any sense of emptiness at all.

Isaiah 51:11 KJV

Therefore the redeemed of the LORD shall return, and come with singing unto Zion; and everlasting joy shall be upon their head: they shall obtain gladness and joy; and sorrow and mourning shall flee away.

Slowing Down to Get More Done

April 14, 2023April 14, 2023 / joseph elon lillie / 3 Comments

My life statement is , slow constant and intentional. I have trouble keeping my life between those goal posts. I have always thought that is mostly because I fill my life with too much. I have always thought that this fullness of schedule makes me end up going too fast. I often feel I have to rush because there is so much to do. This makes me lose the ability to be constant. Intentionality also suffers .

In prayer I was asking the Lord to teach me how to slow things down a bit. In answer I heard this line from Star Wars

It is Yoda rebuking Luke for letting his mind run too fast., Yoda says, “All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was, hmm? What he was doing.”

Sooo…..Slowing down means taking in where I am and what I am doing? It involves learning to stop thinking ahead to the next thing and learning to be present in what I am doing?

Today was another trip up to Claremont, to see Grace. Usually I let myself feel rushed: Hurry Up, (pray along the way), visit, Hurry back (pray on the way back). I usually squish grocery shopping into the drive back and then when I get home I go quickly on to next thing.

I have wanted for several months to turn one of these trips into a photo trip, but I always feel too rushed to do it.

Today I decided to fight those feelings and to just stop for picture taking. In fact I INTENTIONALLY DECIDED to make several stops.

I learned something. Slowing down and stopping in a planned way did not really significantly change the time it took to accomplish my visit to Grace.

Sullivan County Health Care under construction

Slowing down did not really change my schedule. But it did challenge my attitude. I found the urge to rush was not actually time bound but emotion bound. My schedule was not rushing me my heart was. The problem was not an external scheduling issue to be solved. It was an internal mindset to be torn down.

All day long I kept finding myself trying to rush to the next thing and I had to fight to keep my mind and heart from looking to the horizon away from where I was and what I was doing.

I am wondering if slowing down is about retraining my brain instead of rethinking my schedule.

WHAT DO YOU DO TO SLOW DOWN YOUR MIND WHEN YOU CAN’T SLOW DOWN YOUR SCHEDULE?

A Journey Of a Thousand Miles

April 13, 2023 / joseph elon lillie / 1 Comment

The ancient Chinese proverb says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

It is very true. I don’t have a lot of time everyday for the jobs that need doing around the Vicarage. I do have a little time everyday to take a single small step. Yesterday I took the small step of cleaning the sitting area of the front porch.

WHAT SMALL STEP ARE YOU TAKING TODAY TOWARDS YOUR GOALS?

A JUMPY RHYTHM

April 12, 2023 / joseph elon lillie / 3 Comments

In school my first instrument was flute.

My second instrument was piano.

As an instrumentalist I always struggled with timing. The instruments I chose to play did not help me with my timing at all. As a worship leader I was famous for slowing down fast songs and speeding up slow songs. I guess it became kind of my hallmark.

As in music so in life.

I have trouble keeping a constant rhythm in this life. Again my chosen vehicle for maintaining rhythm in life is probably not helping. Ministry is a constant switching up of rhythms. Each day is different in workload and pace: Yesterday I cancelled staff meeting, had lunch with missionaries and taught a group of young boys about Easter in the evening.

Today I am shoring up, the services I have for the rest of the week, my afternoon meeting cancelled and I am off tonight.

Tomorrow I have a meeting in the morning, in the afternoon and at night

Friday I am taking a three hour drive up to Claremont and back to visit a parishioner on hospice and then I have a medical appointment for my mother

Saturday I have a seminar in the middle of the day and have to get ready for the first preach of our new series on Sunday.

Each day comes with its own rhythm and so I find myself constantly trying to create new anchors for standard practices.

. I have figured out my morning schedule pretty well.

My afternoon and evening schedules…..well they are a work in progress.

I think what I struggle with is decision fatigue. The later in the day it gets the harder it is for me to decide how to maintain a rhythm once it gets knocked off kilter. Once a rhythm is blown it takes me hours, sometimes days to get it back into a semblance of order.

A good example happened on Monday. I had a funeral.

Performing funerals is a rhythm unique to my work. Monday is usually my day off, but when a funeral come,s a funeral comes and days off get switched up, rhythms get shifted. This funeral came between 11 A.M. and 1 P.M. followed by men’s group at 7 P.M Usually I have off from Sundays afternoon until Monday evening.

I handled the initial rhythm shift well. But I was not prepared for how it would back me for the next days. Since Monday I have been having difficulty keeping my rhythm steady. I am finding myself suddenly changing course or plans midstream, getting distracted, losing focus, making decisions too fast or too slow. Saying yes when I should say no and saying no when I should say yes in a number of little business and ministry circumstances.

This morning in my early morning prayer time I sat before God and said, “God I realize I have temporarily lost control. Help me to begin anew. I can’t seem to get my rhythm back on my own so help me.”

Prayer is always answered. He is helping. My writing this blog is evidence that a rhythm has been restored.

WHAT DO YOU DO TO RESTORE LIFE RHYTHM WHEN IT GETS OUT OF WHACK?

Let It Begin

April 8, 2023 / joseph elon lillie / 3 Comments

Spring has arrived. With it comes the possibility of outdoor work. The porch needs to be cleaned and set up for the summer.

The fence I bought last fall needs to be set up

The broken stonework needs to be fixed

The critters winter Burroughs need to be filled in with cement.

The old stone porch needs to be repurposed into stone walls and planters.

Two brush piles await the fire pit.

The sumac stands need to be cut back so the pathways are passable through the gardens.

And the old garden beds need to be done away with and resettled into their new locations.

So that’s my list for now. Let it begin.

WHAT DOES YOUR OUTDOOR SPRING CLEANING LIST LOOK LIKE?

POOR RECEPTION AND BUTT DIALS

April 7, 2023 / joseph elon lillie / 1 Comment

This has been a day of phone foibles.

It is funny how we have come to rely on these little devices for so much of life and how much of an inconvenience they can cause when they don’t work the way we want them too.

I like to talk to my family in the morning on a group messenger call. I don’t get to every morning but at least every other day I like to try. Normally when I travel up to see my ward Grace, in Claremont NH, I don’t have service so I usually miss those days of chatting with the kids and my sister.

Since Grace has gone on hospice, I try to make the trip to see her every Friday religiously (pun intended).

Last Friday I discovered that the towns just North of our town border must have put in a new cell tower, because I got reception for a family call all the way to the border of Keene NH.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

This morning I initiated the family call. Sadly whatever cell tower was working last week was not working this week because I lost the call about one mile past the border of Winchendon.

Photo by Serkan Gu00f6ktay on Pexels.com

Well, that wasn’t the whole of it. When I got back to town and finally regained reception, I somehow butt dialed a whole Bible study group from the church on a call that lasted five minutes before I noticed it.

Technology is great until it isn’t.

THE IRONIC SIDE OF GOD

April 4, 2023 / joseph elon lillie / 3 Comments

God loves irony.

I never thought I would be a lead pastor. I was very content as an assistant. I always felt called to the pastoral lifestyle…the prayer ministry…the study….the preparation of sermons…the visitation and actual pastoring of the flock…navigating the supernatural move of The Holy Spirit… spiritual warfare. All of that felt like a natural fit for me. As an assistant those were the focuses of my work.

As a lead pastor I knew I would also have to assume leadership in the business end of the church’s work….The managing of staff… the balancing of budgets…the care of the building and property of the church. These felt like less of a fit. In spite of that I knew that when our last lead pastor left, I was being called to let my name stand for the position.

I let it stand.

I became the lead pastor.

It came with increased spiritual work.

It also came with three building projects which had been waiting in the wings for some time. The time has nowcome to address these projects as I reach my second and third year….the time when, according to my mentor, ministry really begins for a lead pastor.

The projects, we at Cornerstone, have affectionately named:

THE PINK

A tip of the hat to our Pepto Bismol-colored and very worn sanctuary rug.

THE STINK

A longstanding and undiagnosed smell that comes seasonally to our church building.

AND THE SINK.

The term we use for our pothole ridden parking lot.

THE PINK, we dealt with last summer with the help of a congregant who is a contractor.

Well, the chairs are still pink but the carpet is no longer a tripping hazard.

THE STINK, has a diagnosis in a rotted and pitted pipe in the floor beneath one of our bathrooms and soon will be dealt with.

THE SINK is a bigger need which we are beginning to deal with as we gather the quotes and prepare to contract with a paving company.

God is funny. He has chosen me to lead the church through this work. I have no inherent ability in running a business and certainly no ability in the building trades (in fact my inability is legendary among my parishoners). Nevertheless, here I stand!

Here is what I am learning about this end of pastoring:

Prayer is as helpful in directing the more earthy matters of the church as it is in directing the spiritual matters of the church.
I do not make any of these decision alone. God has made us a church and He has raised up a very talented leadership team in this church. He has placed voices schooled with the wisdom we need for each of these works.
Absolute agreement is not needed to move forward in the work of God. What is needed is unity and those two things are very different.
Mistakes can and will happen along the way. They are as important as the successes and have much to teach us as a church body.

God loves irony. He also loves putting His people in positions where they learn that what seems like irony is really just spiritual growth potential.

Notes From the Vicarage

A minister's family living in a micro forest garden