“So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, “Take and eat it; it will be bitter in your stomach, but it will be as sweet as honey in your mouth.”” -Revelation 10:9
“Eating the little scroll” is a phrase that describes the pastoral life I live.
The words “sweet and bitter” capture the experience of taking in and digesting the truth in tandem with all the stories in my mind and heart that will be part of people’s lives that will be coming to the table of the Lord every Sunday.
It churns within me as I nibble the “little scroll”, an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one. What’s little to God is far too big for me, a painful process I return to every week.
This sacred cycle of being expanded and contracted, stretched and relaxed by the Word and its potent, pungent and powerful substance is exhausting. It’s a spiritual gastronomy that revolves around providing nourishing milk and meat for the Saints and those lured in by the aromas of a promising feast.
Afterwards, there’s always dishes to be done. Loads of them lay stacked waiting for the process of washing and returning them to their short lived resting place.
Sundays you desperately try to ignore the mess of what has been done. You rest in the afterglow of the satisfaction of work being done, while preparing yourself for the responses. People’s reviews, praise and problems, gratitude and kindness, persnicketiness and pontificating, the confessional and the combative.
But mostly…it’s silence, an unknown and unrecognized response to all that has been prepared and served. An emotionally deflating hanging in the air that leaves you unable to accurately judge what you’ve really accomplished. Appetites and needs are hard to correctly judge and they are relentlessly perpetual. “Sweet and bitter” is a challenging experience to correctly discern.
Sometimes on Sunday afternoons and evenings, most assuredly Mondays, you deal with the aftermath in the kitchen. You review, ruminate, wrestle, repent, mourn, grieve, rejoice, revel and savor. But mostly you clean up, restock and return to the collected posture of preparing…yet again.
The love of it all is very real, the tender and deep drive to provide healthy and nourishing sustenance, but the deflation, depletion and diminishing are true as well, as every breastfeeding mother knows.
You are reshaped by the feeding.
The Apostle Paul likened it to a motherly giving of one’s very self to another: “Like a nursing mother caring for her own children…” -1 Thessalonians 2:7.
It leaves you exhausted and swarmy with love and good feelings, as well as an anticipation of the soon to come expectations.
This is the motherly life of pastoral care.
What did Paul recommend Timothy?