Excerpt taken from Pause for Pastors.You can purchase your copy HERE or on Amazon.
I believe in the balanced diet of faith and reason. I reject selecting one of those components while rejecting the other. Most groups and individuals—most pastors and churches—accentuate one more than the other. For our individual spiritual growth, for our healing from ministry burnout, for our survival from the storms of pastoring, I argue that we should welcome them both.
When the doctors weren’t sure I would ever read again, I met regularly with a speech therapist. The reader and writer and speaker and pastor and thinker in me appeared to be gone. A confused man was left—I searched for words, I battled to recall, I labored to remember, I failed to maintain mental direction, I could no longer spell.
Yet, with the help of God and family and friends and doctors and a speech therapist, I worked to get things to work. I had to find mental and emotional equilibrium, letting faith and reason become partners.
Whatever your story, I dare you to invite them both to the same table. Sit with faith and dare to stare down a giant or toss a rock his way. Sit with reason and research a practical way that wind and gravity and weight and sounds might make the giant hit the dirt quickly.
Study deeply and apply in faith what you’ve learned. Believe for the impossible and cram historical examples of God’s work through church tradition.
Believe. Study.
Have faith. Use reason.
Dive into the water and swim with Jesus—after you make sure that is what Jesus is inviting you to do.
Not either or. Both and.
Realize which area you tend to ignore. Pursue time with your Father by applying that discipline. Or maybe close your many other books and open the Bible—staying in a text, breathing in a text, digesting in a text all for yourself rather than for a sermon.
Let it be like a new beginning for you.
