I have put the “Dear God” blog in my RSS reader and it’s often interesting — people post anonymous prayers to God. In this post, a guy talks about how he was a pastor for 23 years and how it killed him. Here’s the part of the post that got to me the most:

“Now that I am not a pastor, people are honest with me. I had no idea how hard life was for so many people because when they came on my ‘turf’ they pretended just as much as I did.”

Wow! I had never thought of that. Evidently people feel a great deal of pressure to look good in front of the reverend. I didn’t realize that I as a pastor, may be projecting something that causes people to hide from me. I see it a bit in those settings where, once someone finds out you are a pastor they clean up their language and get all embarrassed about the things they just said.

I don’t know what the answer is but I know this isn’t good. This means that at any given time most of us are ministering to a bunch of facades, not real people. I guess it’s because we pastors are projecting a facade.