Early Heart-Rate Boost

From a book written to pastors by Eugene Peterson:

"None of these acts [prayer, study of the word, visiting with individuals] is public, which means that no one knows for sure whether or not we're doing any of them. People hear us pray in worship, they listen to us preach and teach from the Scriptures, they notice when we are listening to them in conversation, but they can never know if we're attending to God in any of this. It doesn't take many years in this business to realize that we can conduct a farily respectable pastoral ministry without giving much more than ceremonial attention to God. Since we can omit these acts of attention without anybody noticing, and because eacho the acts involves a great deal of rigor, it is easy and common to slight them."

Thankfully...

...I work with a group of people who hold each other pretty accountable to these things and don't fake it...

...but it's scary to know that Eugene Peterson--who's pretty astute in observations of the Christian culture--thinks it's so common to "slight" those most important things (they're the first things in a CBC pastor's job description, by the way) that he wrote a series of three books about them.

Wow.