Over the past week, I’ve had more than the usual number of pastoral visits and conversations. I spent half an hour sitting with a dead woman, waiting for her family to arrive. I sat beside the hospital bed of someone who is in the midst of serious health crisis. I talked with someone who is under stress and having problems with his/her spouse. I listened to someone tell me about the illness of a grandchild’s parent. And quite a few more besides.

My older sister is a non-fiction writer, and professor of writing at Indiana University East. Recently she told the students in one of her writing classes that they should always keep a notebook on hand, “a little book you jot things down in when they occur to you… because everything must be turned into writing. Everything.” I used to keep such a notebook, but I don’t any longer. The change came when I started working as a minister. The spoken word demands a different kind of thought process than does the written word — it is less precise, it requires more repetition, it is more formulaic, it is inherently improvisational (even if you speak from a text as I do), and it is rooted in memory not in written notes. Because of this, most preachers are not particularly good writers of prose, although some preachers wind up being pretty good poets.

Oh, and something else happened to me this week. I was driving somewhere with a member of our church, and a small silver sports car pulled right out in front of me without even looking and I jammed on the brakes hit the horn swerved missed the idiot by about two feet and shouted through the windshield at the other driver (who didn’t even look until the last minute!), What the $%&#, buddy!?! Yep, I dropped a big loud f-bomb right where a church member could hear it (fortunately he’s the son of a preacher and so has no illusions about the ministry). If ever there was an incident worth recording in the notebook I do not carry, that was it.