I read once where Abraham Lincoln died with articles in his pocket that spoke well of his presidency and his leadership. Those in leadership understand this gesture. Everyone wants to feel like they are making a difference and that they are doing a commendable job.

October is pastor appreciation month. It is a month where congregates are told to affirm their pastors. Through the years, not only in October, but all through the year, simple little notes and not so simple gestures have been enacted to affirm my own efforts in pastoral ministry. I actually keep the notes. They are in my tax records for each year; yes, right there next to the utility bills are the notes in a file collected all together. I do not keep them to re-read them. Hardly ever do I go back through and read any of them. But I see them if I poke around in an old tax year trying to find something. It is the visual equivalent to the vitamin for ministry-a shot in the arm to keep you going.

Quite a part from cards, I can remember some life altering encouragement which reshaped the trajectory of several situations. I remember once a few days out from going on vacation in the mountains of Tennessee that my car did not check out right. Because of the need for some special parts, my brakes could have potentially failed and my mountain vacation car was on the fritz. I went to the Saturday morning prayer meeting and we all prayed about it. I got a call later that afternoon that a local car dealership had worked out a matter and I was to pick up a new car for a week for my vacation. The kids were amazed. Their parents had their hearts filled with gratitude. The stories are legion. How much good beef have I eaten through gift cards of thanks through the years?

Some of the stories are funny. I had a lady once bring me her husband's camel sport jacket for dress. It was beautiful and it fit just right, seemed hardly warn. I wore it out. The first Sunday I wore it, it looked great. I wanted to thank the guy for giving it to me. I went right up to him and started the conversation only to notice her in the background gesturing me away. Come to find out, it was his graying hair and the mix with the camel jacket and her taste that was not working. He had no idea I was wearing his jacket...and she wanted to keep it that way. That is ethical tension. One time a group of anonymous families put together a coalition and had a "clothes horse" man take me to a men's store to spend the money on a few suits. I was flabbergasted. My heart was full of joy, until I began to contemplate just why this gesture had emerged. Was it about their love for me? Or was it, in the end, about their sense that I dressed like an idiot? I was afraid to ask. Was it grace or a referendum on my wardrobe?

Maybe another reason why these affirming gestures mean so much is because of the other comments that pastoral leadership receives. I cannot print what I have been told...about myself. Some one wrote a book once called "Well Intended Dragons". Maybe you have to be there in pastoral ministry to appreciate the title. Believe me the dragons are out there. It is their fire breathing feedback that makes one appreciate all the more the encouragement from others. I have had associates fight back their emotions as they repeated to me what they had been told. I have picked up the fragments of their vision of themselves and sought to glue it back together. That old "sticks and stones" proverb is a lie. After a while, you come to expect negative feedback and listen for the truth and do not take it so personal. As Warren Wiersbe used to say, "In time they shoot through the same hole. It does not hurt as bad." As Gordon McDonald encourages one looks for the kernel of truth in every bushel of criticism and grows from it and prays through it.

But thank God for the Barnabas-s out there that encourage. They are worth their weight in gold. I was particularly amused at a recent prayer meeting when a brother identified October as the month of pastoral encouragement. He charged the group to encourage the pastoral staff. He was waxing on in his challenge and he may have over reached when he drove the point home with "we need to really tell them what we think of them". It got real quiet and there was a lull...and then he quickly added "I mean, tell them something good." The whole room exploded with laughter. We laugh at times so we do not cry. Everybody knows there will always be those who take the freedom to tell them what they think of them...good or bad feedback. Thank God that the lion's share for me through the years has been encouraging. What a privilege it is to serve God's great family...the church of Jesus Christ.

The "at a boy" we in pastoral ministry yearn for is the last one, the one from the Great Shepherd of the sheep. We live and work to hear in the end "Well done, you good and faithful servant." Pray that we may order our lives to make that a reality. It is required of a steward that he be found faithful.