Other "Thinking Drafts" and writing by Keith Drury -- http://www.indwes.edu/tuesday .

My wife, Sharon, is a frugal German who can stretch the last half inch of jelly for a month. She simply spreads it thinner each morning. Me? I like my jelly thick. In fact, I don't even like jelly at all, I prefer jam. It's thicker. But jelly isn't the only thing which gets spread too thin. Pastors get spread thin, too. (Mind you, I didn't say pastors are thin, just spread thin.)

In fact, getting spread too thin may be an occupational hazard of ministry. Can any of us claim to ever go home finished? No. There are always people still to reach, families needing help, new programs to start, old programs to end, and phone calls to make that aren't-required-but-really-should-be-made-anyway. Being in the ministry means going home every single day with the task unfinished. It's no wonder ministers seem especially prone to (emotional) burn out and (moral) spin out.

How to know you're spread too thin? You forget appointments, make more mistakes, sometimes feeling like you're sinking. You get further and further behind and start thinking you'll never catch up. People say, 'Slow down pastor' and you think it is a compliment. You begin approaching work with a sense of dread. You promise yourself 'It will get better after ______.' But it doesn't.

So, what to do when you get spread too thin?

When you've got more things to do than you've got time to do them in, some things have got to go to the back burner. The back burner is where the old wood stove was less hot and the old timers put their stew to simmer, the equivalent of today's crock-pot. Ministers who keep all their ideas at a constant boiling point eventually fail. We can't act on every idea we get. Some belong on the back burner for a while. Ideas are like wine: they grow better with time. (OK, OK, well, cheese then.) If you are spread too thin, put some things on hold for a while. Like reading this column. [ Or writing it... ]

If your jobs were chickens and your time was feed, would your chickens be well fed? Most of us have too little feed for our huge flock of chickens. We think we need more feed. But really we need fewer chickens. In fact, the more 'successful' we get in the ministry the more chickens we'll have to feed -- the more demands on our time. Our quantity of feed is fixed -- we have 24 hours in each day. We've just got too many chickens to feed with those hours. So we feed less and less time to a larger and larger flock of jobs. Eventually we starve the flock, (often beginning with our own family). What to do when we get spread too thin? Butcher some chickens -- kill off some jobs and feed the remaining time the important chickens you kept alive.

Sometimes a minister gets so far behind he or she needs a fresh start. We'll simply never catch up. Our only hope is to toss out our unfinished To-Do lists, discard our five-year goals, and start over with a plain sheet of paper. Back in the 1970's I worked a month for one 'people person' minister who got so far behind in his correspondence that he simply walked in the office, rolled his eyes at the foot-high stack of letters, then slid the entire stack off his desk into the waste can! I'm not suggesting that radical a solution. (But I admit that I've been spread too thin this last month -- if you haven't gotten a response to your E-Mail you may be on the 'back burner' with more than a thousand other e-mails. And if you never get a reply... you might be one of the chickens that got butchered!)

But what about you? What do you think? What do you do when you get 'spread too thin?'

So what do you think?

To contribute to the thinking on this issue e-mail your response to Tuesday@indwes.edu