Howard B. Foshee

“Pastor Ray O. Jones stated his feelings well as he wrote of a conversation he had with a nine-year–old boy. * The youngster had asked him, “What's it like to be a preacher?” Pastor Jones replied: “Being a pastor is something like many other tasks in life, and yet it is unlike anything else in all the world. It's being loved and unloved, wanted and unwanted, understood and misunderstood. It's joy and sadness. It's heaven—and just to be honest—a bit of hell at times. “My job keeps me in touch with birth and death, love and hate. As a pastor, I must be able to go from death to birth in a moment's notice. It's like talking with a drunken bum one minute and counseling with a beauty queen the next. It's climbing the stairs of a hospital wondering how many times I've climbed them before and how much—or how little—I've helped someone in pain. “It's someone saying, ‘If it hadn't been for you.’ It's walking across a lonely graveyard after a funeral and wondering about the old man you buried. It's picking a man up out of the gutter when no one seems to care and telling him God cares, that God loves him and sent Christ into the world to die for his sins. “There is no joy comparable to that of being a pastor. The heartaches and sorrows at times overwhelm us as shepherds of God's people, but the joy of serving, loving, and sharing with the people of God more than compensate for the hard and difficult hours.”
― Howard B. Foshee, Now That You're a Deacon