I learned to play piano from my dad’s cousin. She was a piano teacher in that she taught me and my siblings, but it wasn’t her career. She just knew how to play the piano and was more than able to guide us through a series of lesson books. I learned to play piano because there was an adult keeping me accountable, but not necessarily because I had someone instructing me in the complexities of the craft.

I cannot recommend highly enough the book Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home by Kate Mangino. I doubt this is the last time I’ll reference it! This is a book about gender roles in the home, but is written broadly to show patterns that might begin with heterosexual couples, but stretch far beyond that. It resonated with my experience as a woman in a straight marriage. It also made sense of how I interact with my jobs.

Because if you’ve watched video content in the past five years, you almost certainly have watched a video on autoplay. It’s what happens when you finish one video and another one immediately queues up. It doesn’t just make it easier to decide what to watch next, it makes that decision for you.

Those were the easy times to categorize work hours. Less simple were the times in which I was out on a walk and realized I had spent a majority of the time internally rehearsing my sermon. Or what about my lunch break? What on earth was I supposed to do on a holiday weekend? What about conversations with friends who were colleagues but who were friends?

One the second Sunday of every month I go to a local nursing home.  In one of the lobby areas there is a piano that looks nice and sounds awful.  At 2 o’clock, I welcome those who have gathered and launch into one of my best pastoral gifts—playing church music written before 1950. 

There’s an assumption that as a pastor you’ll end up getting a few phone calls in the night. Granted, it can happen. People go to the hospital, have a serious accident, or have any number of urgent events. But in my small church, these phone calls are almost non-existent.

My name is Rachel and I’m a pastor. That’s usually the first way I can introduce myself. Being a pastor is one of those things that takes up a lot of space.