The Ruches: The Too-Easy Decision
Hard Fact No. 1: The ministry never has been and never will be a nine-to-five job.
Hard Fact No. 2: Ministers who do not give attention to their marriages come to regret it.
Those two facts, of course, do not mesh very well. Both are true; both are acknowledged by husbands as well as wives. Neither fact is going to change. Pastoral couples simply have to accept them.
Most pastors find their own natural ambition heightened by what is at stake in the ministry: eternal destinies. One pastor tells an early experience that typifies the conundrum:
I was a youth pastor, and one day I had an impulse to stop and see a certain teenage girl. I didn't do it—and that night, she ran away.
After that, whenever I'd get an impression to do something, I was afraid not to follow through on it. I don't think I did very well at taking a day off for seven or eight years.
Finally, there were a couple of times at home in bed when Barbara said, "I don't know you" or "I don't feel a part of you. You're doing a great job as a pastor, but you don't know me."
Dr. Dennis Guernsey, author and professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, says, "A pastor's wife is put in a terrible bind when the church becomes The Other Woman—but her husband isn't unrighteous for sleeping with her. No one considers this obsession immoral; he's 'doing God's work.'"
Most women bear this "affair" in silence for several years, until the pressure becomes intolerable. Then they confront. Richard Foth, who spent his first dozen ministry years pioneering a new church in Urbana, Illinois, tells about one day when he came home exhausted from a marathon of appointments. His normally placid wife (by then the mother of three young children) said, "Dick, I have a question. How ...
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