Day Six

They keep telling us about the slower pace of life in the rural communities, and we keep having packed thirteen-hour days of dashing from place to place at lightning speed. It just seems a little ironic is all I’m saying.

The effects of our breakneck speed are beginning to show. The bloodshot eyes, the desperate search for coffee every time we enter a room, the mutinous looks. Our leaders have noticed, and today seemed to cut a third out of the itinerary, filling out the extra time by stuffing in two hours of group reflection. In short, we’ve done a lesser quantity of stuff today, so I have less of a blow-by-blow account to write, which is probably a good thing. On the other hand, the quality of what we did do was pretty important.


The first place we visited was the Natural Resource Conservation Service and Farm Service Administration. That’s a mouthful, and probably conjures up images of dry bureaucratic cubicles. Such a notion couldn’t have been further from the truth. The people we met were warm and engaging and greeted us with orange juice and donuts. (In case you haven’t noticed, a really easy way to win over Lutherans is to provide them with orange juice and donuts, or coffee and seven-layer bars, or Adam’s personal favorite, orange-flavored drink with anything.) Then they used colorful graphs and vivid photographs to help us grasp the drought and water problems out here on the high plains. ‘It’s a little drier out here’ doesn’t quite cover it; western Nebraska and its neighbors have for several years been experiencing one of the worst droughts on record, though we rarely read about it in the Chicago Tribune. In the face of such challenges the folks out at Sidney’s branch of the NRCS do some incredible work in order to, in their words, “help people help the land.”

Besides the sheer information we received, many of the people we met at the NRCS and FSA were tied to the land themselves, and partly because of this they seemed to take their jobs personally. One of the people we met was a farmer when he wasn’t in the office; he actually held down three jobs in order to preserve his farming lifestyle. Another was the daughter of our Sidney tour guide (a farmer himself) who with the utmost professionalism (seriously) asked Dad to confirm this or that fact or experience during her talk; this was pretty much the coolest thing ever. Both spoke of their deep love for rural life.


And then after lunch today we had the following itinerary:

1. Physician’s Clinic.
2. Hospital and Emergency Room.
3. Cancer Care Center.
4. Funeral Home.

What a doozy.

On our first night in Sidney, the Nebraska Synod Rural Ministry Task Force asked us what we hoped to get out of this immersion course. In addition to some other hopes I said I hoped it might transform my learning at LSTC; I hoped it might affect the way I take classes, choose classes, and approach my learning generally. I hoped it might help me know a bit more about how to prepare for a first call out on the high plains – or anywhere, for that matter.

After today, I know I’m going to need more pastoral care classes. Partly this is because I took CPE at a homeless shelter and I don’t have the hospital experience many of my colleagues do. I don’t regret that; I needed the CPE experience that I had. But it does mean that I have more work and more learning and more practice to do to get as comfortable as some of my colleagues seem to be walking the halls of the hospital.

But even so, maybe all the classes and all the practice in the world won’t prepare me for the first times I’ll have to go to the places on today’s itinerary as a pastor. And maybe it’ll always make me a little nervous and scared inside. I don’t know. I guess what I’m trying to say is that today brought home something that’s been true of the Rural Ministry Immersion course at various points throughout the week. Perhaps inevitably, this week hasn’t been about rural ministry exclusively. In a relentlessly concrete way, it’s been about ministry in general.

And that’s been incredibly powerful, for me at least. There’s something very different about sitting in a pastoral care classroom talking about grief and loss versus standing in a tiny room in the basement of a funeral home with formaldehyde on the table and talking about where your role as a pastor is in helping a family decide whether to bury or cremate. Classroom preparation is essential, absolutely, I know, but the reality of being out here, all day, every day, is hitting me with the force of concrete.




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Which is why it’s nice to come home a little early tonight, to put on a warm coat and go out into the cold night, stealing glances at the stars (stars!), as I learn how to do the daily chores of feeding heifers and steers and cats and chickens, to come into the house and smell a gourmet (not even exaggerating, read Day Three for more) meal already cooking, to have a dessert of crème broulet that I helped make (crème broulet? what?!?!), to watch the end of Comanche Moon and finally to collapse onto bed with a dog sleeping in the next room. Rural ministry: it drains you, and it fills you up again.



MCK