hristmas Eve was a little different for me this year.

When I joined a church staff for the first time almost 9 years ago, worshiping and working at Christmas became an annual reality. As a minister, you’re celebrating the season and Jesus’ birth with all of the awe, joy and peace you can, but your worship is also tied closely to the orders of service, prayers, litanies, candles and carols that come each December.

The church where I currently serve as Minister to College Students has two services on Christmas Eve. Due to family obligations and schedules I, for the first time in over 7 years, had to take off the evening of December 24. This meant no Christmas Eve services for me.

As I noted above, however, Christmas for a minister is a delicate balance of work and worship, and attending somewhere was something my wife and I did not want to miss out on . We found another local church that had a later service we could attend and headed there after the present opening festivities with my family.

It became clear, as soon as we walked through the door at 11pm on Christmas Eve, that I would have some anxiety to get over. As church members greeted one another at the door, I felt like I needed to make sure they had bulletins. As the service began, I felt like I needed to be preparing to pray for something, to light something, or at least check to make sure my tie was straight (which I was not wearing!). Throughout the service I checked the order of worship at least one hundred times more than anyone else in the sanctuary. You see, I was finding it hard to separate “staff minister Lawrence”, from just “Lawrence”.

At some point, as we sang the verses to ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ or some other Christmas carol, my mind settled and I reminded myself that I was not a minister in the room. I was not there to lead, to instruct or to keep things flowing. I was simply there to be.

Christmas Eve reminded me that we must always find time to be. We get so caught up in our work (yes, for a minister, ministry is both a calling and work!), that we forget to rest, to be our true self apart from our job or day to day life responsibilities, to be the person God is continuously crafting us in to.

I don’t have children, but I would imagine that some of you could afford a day off spent with them. Some need to grab a cup of coffee and  just sit in sacred silence. Some of you need to get out of dodge for a few hours, and others just need to sleep.

For this staff minister, it took experiencing a service from the ‘other side’ to realize my need to just be– the person God has made me in to, who I really am. The need to rest in God’s presence without fear, worry or anxiousness. To both sing ‘Silent Night,’ and to experience it.

What do you need to do to refocus and discover yourself again? How can you find a way to just ‘be’? Maybe it’s a trip out of town, a day at the park, a few hours at Barnes and Noble, or a morning with no alarm.

For me, I just walked into a church…