Dear Friend,
It's a dark winter evening, snow falling steadily, and I'm driving home from a client meeting with a briefcase full of paperwork on the passenger seat. The plows are out ahead of me, throwing up a wall of gray slush, and my hands ache a little from gripping the wheel too tightly for too many miles. Home is still 30 minutes ahead. A warm kitchen, a chair, maybe twenty minutes to close my eyes before eating some leftover supper. I can already feel how good that chair is going to feel.
But I don't go home. I turn toward the hospital instead, because one of our church families has been sitting in a waiting room since that morning, and they’re under the heavy weight of concern. So I go in still wearing my coat, still smelling of winter, and I sit with them. I give some hugs, hold their hands, and share with them the pastoral love I truly feel. I pray for them, laying our shared requests at the feet of God. And when I finally do drive home, it isn't to rest. It's to the kitchen table, a Bible open next to a legal pad, working through a sermon that still needs some research before Sunday, my eyes stinging a little by the time I finally close the Bible for the night.
I want to be honest with you about something I don't say often. There were nights, driving between those two worlds, when I wondered if I was actually failing both of them. No one at the office knew how much of me the church had already used up that week. No one at church knew how much the office had already used up either. I wasn't looking for applause, nor am I now. I just knew I was tired in a place that sleep doesn't reach, and I carried that quietly, because I didn't think anyone other than my wife had the spare capacity to hear it.
If any of that sounds familiar, I want to say something to you plainly, because maybe no one else has said it to you before. You teach that Sunday school class after a full week at a job that has nothing to do with church, and you go home some Sundays wondering if anyone even noticed you were there. You drive your neighbor to chemo on your one day off, and nobody puts your name in a bulletin for it. You've been quietly discipling your grandkids for a decade, praying over them by name every night, with no title and no paycheck and no one to tell you it matters. I want you to hear this from someone who has stood exactly where you're standing: it matters. It has always mattered. The absence of a salary and a title was never proof of the absence of a calling.
Paul knew this in his bones, long before I ever did. When he arrived in Corinth, he didn't set up shop asking the church to fund him first. He found a couple named Aquila and Priscilla, and because they shared his trade, he stayed with them and worked—"for by occupation they were tentmakers" (Acts 18:3). Picture him some evening, hands raw from the awl and the heavy cloth, and then picture him an hour later, using the same hands, breaking bread and teaching the very people whose tents he'd been mending. He wasn't slipping out of ministry to go earn a living and then slipping back in when his shift ended. Both were happening at once, in the same tired hands, much the way both were happening in mine.
He told the Thessalonians exactly why: "our labor and toil: we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God" (1 Thessalonians 2:9). And to the Corinthians, almost as if daring anyone to accuse him of doing ministry for the money: "What then is my reward? That in my preaching I may present the gospel free of charge" (1 Corinthians 9:18). He had every right, by his own argument a few verses earlier, to be supported by the churches he served. He laid that right down anyway, at real cost to himself, and never once described it as a lesser way to serve.
I think about Jesus this way too, more than I used to. Before there were three years of miracles and crowds, there were years of sawdust and callused hands in a carpenter's shop in Nazareth, years Scripture passes over almost in silence because they didn't need announcing to matter. The Son of God spent most of His earthly life doing quiet, unnoticed work that no one thought worth writing down, long before anyone wrote a Gospel about Him. And then, when the announced ministry finally came, He gave that away freely too, all the way to a cross He didn't owe us and we could never have earned. If the pattern of costly love without a bill attached runs all the way back to Him, maybe the tentmaking years of your life, and mine, are closer to the center of the story than we thought, not some detour from it.
Here's what I've come to believe two callings can do that one alone can't: they keep you from ever fully settling into just one identity. Neither job let me rest easy in it as the whole of who I was. When the ministry felt discouraging, the office was still waiting the next morning, plain and unglamorous, reminding me that faithfulness doesn't run on applause. When the office felt like nothing but numbers, the church was still waiting that same week, reminding me that a ledger was never going to be the real measure of a life. Neither one alone paid enough to carry my family, and neither one alone was ever going to be enough to carry my whole sense of who I was, either. I needed them both, together, more than I understood at the time.
I won't pretend the cost wasn't real, because it was, and I'd be lying to you if I dressed it up as something lighter than it actually felt some weeks. But I've stopped reading that tiredness as a sign that something had gone wrong. I think now it was closer to a sign that something was actually being given, freely, the way Paul gave it, the way Christ gave it first. And if you're the one right now who's tired in a place where sleep doesn't reach, doing work no one has thanked you for, I want you to receive this as a blessing: what you are laying down, quietly, unpaid, unnoticed, is not wasted. It is seen by the One who laid everything down first, and it is precious to Him even on the nights it doesn't feel precious to you.
So tonight, if it's snowing where you are or not, and you're driving home from whatever your version of that client meeting looks like, and there's a hospital room or a phone call or a tired child who needs you to stop before you get all the way home—go ahead and stop. You're not choosing the lesser calling over the real one. Like Paul, and like Christ before him, and like me on some of those dark, snowy evenings, you may simply be living your whole calling at once, in the same coat, in the same snow, on the same night. And whatever it costs you, however unnoticed it goes, it is never wasted on the One who has been counting every mile.
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Neal Letteney <><
The Pastor's Hearth
Looking for more? Browse the full collection of letters from The Pastor's Hearth.
Before you leave the fire, I invite you to sit with these three questions:
1. Where am I already doing ministry that I've never once called by that name, and have I let myself feel the weight of how much it matters?
2. What has my calling cost me that I've never actually said out loud to anyone, and who is safe enough to finally tell?
3. Can I receive tonight, as a genuine blessing rather than a scolding, that what I've quietly laid down for others has not gone unseen by God?
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