Stuff Christians Like - Jonathan Acuff

I have been reading this book "Stuff Christian's Like" by jonathan acuff, thanks to a recommendation from our sweet friend vanessa wyler. my word it's hilarious!!!  i love his candidness & sarcasm! one of our favorite chapters/blurps from the book are "wishing you had an easy job like working at a church". I can't tell you how many times when i have told people my husband is a pastor they just couldn't comprehend what exactly that entails, when i say it's a 24-7 job they look at me like i am either lying or nuts. some day when i have a little more time i will write life as a pastor's wife from my point of view.

here is my favorite chapter:
Wishing You Had an Easy Job - Like Working at a Church

Don’t you wish you worked at a church? That would be such a dream job! I’ve never been blessed that way but my assumption is that other than Sunday, a church job is kind of like having a really long quiet time. You probably get to read the Bible all day and take long breaks in your prayer closet and spend eight hours a day growing your own spiritual life. I’m sure the phone rings sometimes, like when someone needs a casserole of hope after a death in the family or a youth group van breaks down, but for the most part I imagine the average day is filled with a lot
of “me time.”

And God is your boss. How cool is that? There’s no politics or in-fighting or gossip like a the average corporate job. It’s just a collection of people, a family really, living out of the gifts God has given them. Loving on each other. (You actually work at a place where “love on” is an acceptable verb!) Everyone is all on the same page, pouring out to each other the love that God is pouring into them. Don’t you want to hug this book right now just thinking about that?

I bet there’s always an acoustic guitar being played somewhere in the office. (Should we even call where people work at a church an “office”? Let’s call it a happy holy spot” instead.) And when you go to make copies on the printer, you’ll hear the acoustic guitar and probably join an impromptu sing-along right there in the mailroom and make up a song.

Is it even really a full-time job? Seriously, other than maybe a few hours on a Sunday morning, what else are you doing? Praying? Worshipping? Holding car washes to raise money for mission trips? What that take, four hours tops? How do you spend the rest of the week? Being loved on, I bet. See, there it is again! That’s the kind of thing that is constantly happening if you work at a church, but good luck trying to say that at a real job. If tomorrow in one of my meetings at work I said, “I really need to love on these third quarter budget estimates,” I would immediately get “laughed on” by my coworkers. Not if you work at a church. They support each other!

Plus, they’ve got an entire congregation full of people that love them unconditionally. Imagine having hundreds of people that are fans of what you do and how you do it. People that are going to wholeheartedly accept what you do and never write mean e-mails no matter if they disagree with your decisions. Me? I read negative e-mails from our customers all the time. People who work at churches? They’re opening thank you notes and sunshine e-mails and gift baskets with delicious cheeses and spiced meats all day long.

Someday, if they ever sunset my job (a fun sounding euphemism we’re actually using now to replace the word “eliminate”), maybe I’ll get a church job and get to live the sweet life.

'Stuff Christians Like' by Jonathan Acuff