rad thought from my friend pete

My friend Pete is a pastor and he sent me this today. I liked it a lot and asked if I could post it and he said sure.

"I took Eugene Peterson's class on Ministry and Spirituality about four times. Once as a student, the other times as a teaching assistant. But it took me that many times to get what he was doing. He was trying to teach us budding pastors not to mess up the churches we serve. The novels he had us read all had they lame pastor figures in them. And we kept trying to turn them into heroes, kept on trying to find the redeeming qualities they had (and they all had them). But that wasn't his point. His point was: Look at all of these new opportunities to sin. Pastors have a wider range of sins to work with than anyone else, because we've got all of these spiritual sins that others don't have (well, I guess parents have them, too). So, he had us read Graham Green's The Power and the Glory, Walter Wangerin's The Book of the Dun Cow, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Aldous Huxley's Grey Eminence, and so on. When the penny finally dropped for me, I thought, "Oh, crap! What am I getting into?"