Growth Changes the Job
The cursor blinked at the bottom of an unfinished sentence. 9:42 p.m. Saturday.
David rubbed his eyes and looked at the sermon notes scattered across his desk, the same desk that used to hold everything he needed by six o'clock on a Thursday. Now it held sticky notes for three staff decisions, a text he hadn't answered from his worship director, and a plate his wife had left outside his office door two hours ago, going cold.
His phone lit up again. A parent from the student ministry has a question about Wednesday night that used to answer itself.
He didn't move to pick it up. He just looked at it.
Five years ago, this building held maybe a hundred and fifty people on a Sunday, and every problem that mattered fit into a conversation in the parking lot after the second service. If something slipped, a volunteer no-show, a mix-up about the potluck, somebody noticed, and somebody else quietly handled it, and nobody wrote it down because nobody needed to.
Now the building held closer to six hundred. The staff had tripled. And somehow David was busier than he'd ever been in the smaller version of this church, back when he was doing more of the actual work with his own two hands.
He'd said something like that once to a pastor two towns over, and the guy had nodded like he already knew the sentence before David finished it.
“I spend my whole day answering questions I never imagined I'd have to think about.”
Not tired from the sermon. Not tired from a hospital visit or a hard conversation in someone's living room. Tired from a hundred small decisions that used to make themselves.
David set the pen down.
He thought about the bridge on Route 9, the one they'd closed last spring for repairs. Nothing had happened to it that anyone could point to, no crash, no storm. It had just been carrying more than it was built for, a little more every year, until an inspector finally found the hairline crack that had probably been there for months.
Nobody blamed the bridge.
He picked his phone back up, sent the parent a short answer, and sat there a while longer, looking at the sentence he still hadn't finished, turning something over that he didn't yet have language for.
Every system carries a weight it was designed to carry. When the weight changes and the system doesn't, the system doesn't fail loudly. It just gets tired in places nobody's watching.
He didn't write that down. He wasn't sure yet if it was a sermon point or something closer to home.
He turned off the desk lamp a little after 10 pm and went to find his wife, who had long since given up waiting for him.
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