If you are looking for four steps through discouragement, then you are going to be disappointed. This is not a prescriptive article. I don’t believe there is an exact formula for this sort of thing. I am offering an account of a difficult season in life and how God moved me through that season. Along that journey, certain things stuck out to me that are worth sharing, but won’t necessarily transfer to you.
I would assume that every human being deals with discouragement, but pastoral ministry brings about its own challenges. I have been at the same church since 1999, leading as the senior pastor since around 2005. Between 2005 and 2020, God took us from a starting place of near collapse to a place of relative health, although growth was very slow. During those fifteen years, God enriched my life with a wife and three children. We had a couple of younger men whom we were hoping to train up to be deacons and eventually elders. Ministries were starting to bear fruit and it felt like we had turned the corner and were moving from a mission to a real congregation that could grow and flourish.
I don’t know that Covid devastated us, but it serves as a good starting point for a series of events that left me perplexed, but not (quite) driven to despair. I will very concisely list some of those things: 1) Covid provided a convenient off-ramp for those looking for a larger church with larger ministries 2) In December of 2020, we found out that our fourth pregnancy had a near certainty of ending in still-birth. For three more months my wife carried Penny, our daughter, who died in utero on March 19, 2021. 3) In 2022, we attempted a church merger with another local congregation that ultimately did not come to pass and provided plenty of opportunity to see what carnality looks like. 4) Following that failure, we lost the younger families and leaders (previously mentioned) to a larger church. 5) God blessed us with another daughter in December 2022, but following post-partum my wife struggled with an auto-immune disease that did not get diagnosed or properly addressed until late 2025.
As I write all of that, it looks like a lot, but I’m just hitting the discouraging events. There were also plenty of good times: genuine joys, and fulfilling friendships, and loving laughter. The trials are only notable for their incongruous presence amidst the fields of God’s blessings.
As an emotion or temporary state of mind, discouragement is – in and of itself – not a sin. But it is a sin to let discouragement dominate our inner man. It is a sin to wallow endlessly in discouragement. God does not intend for us to stay in a place of discouragement, but as our Good Shepherd He leads us out of dry and barren places, or alternately gives streams in the desert. So here are four notable ways God helped me through a discouraging season.
Clarity
When we are in the fog of discouragement, we sometimes lose sight of the great themes of God’s goodness and providence. Sure, God is good to Israel, but as for me…(Psalm 73) Like sailors to whom the stars have been obscured, we must turn to other means of navigation. We may not be able to see the north star, but we can see the compass in our hand. We may not be able to calculate a lunar, but we can sound the depths and log our speed. Sometimes the way out starts with finding one truth to grasp and then build from there. I am very thankful that God has given us His Word and His Spirit so that we can think biblically and clearly about our own circumstances. God has given me a love for truth and I find it hard to indulge in lies, even the pleasurable ones.
Pretty early on in this journey, one truth I grasped onto was simply the knowledge that God did not intend or desire for me to be discouraged. I knew that we (I say “we” because Katie endured all of these events by my side) were discouraged, but I knew that I could not remain a pastor if I could not get through the discouragement. I remember telling her and probably my dad, “I will get out of the ministry before I am a discouraged pastor. A discouraged pastor doesn’t do anyone any good.” So I had clarity about that. I knew the path forward was a path that had to include joy. I had a destination.
I also had clarity about wanting to stay in ministry. I couldn’t pretend that I would be content to be out of ministry. Out of the pulpit. After our merger attempt failed, we were on our way to church one morning and I told Katie something along the lines of, “I know it’s hard, but if I were not on my way to preach this morning, I wouldn’t be happy.” And beyond that, I felt no call to move to a different ministry, though opportunities came up. None tempted me, though I often wanted to be tempted.
I would say one other thought that struck me during this time is that I knew if we saw someone saved, or baptized, or a marriage restored, or a family join the church, then my discouragement would diminish, if not dissipate entirely. And what did we need for that to happen? Just the gospel and the wisdom of the Word. So we had everything we needed to experience a movement of God’s blessing.
It was little bits of clarity like this that allowed us to make progress. Slow progress, but progress. In the Spring of 2024, we made the decision to take a 6 week sabbatical, not because we wanted to quit but because we wanted to move forward. (I have counseled other tired/discouraged pastors that they needed to take a break, and that taking a few weeks off is a small price for their congregations to pay to restore their pastor versus them burning out and the church having to hunt for a new pastor). Although the fog had not dissipated, we were making proactive decisions based on the clarity we had, not the confusion we felt.
A “Guilty” Pleasure
During our six week sabbatical, I still had my secular employment, but we structured the time so that Katie could get a few days off completely to herself, and I would get a few days off completely to myself, and we would take a family trip together. I spent my few days at a friend’s lake house just a few hours north of us, where I turned off all screens and spent a lot of time reading my Bible. But I also read something else. I found a guilty pleasure book.
My mom had left this book by Jan Karon lying around, and I just picked it up one day and started reading it. Turns out it was about an older Anglican pastor in a small town who kinda thinks his life is over and has somewhat passed him by, but his life is really just really beginning. Through a series of novels, he falls in love, adopts a red-headed boy, has some adventures, etc… It’s not quite Hallmark, but it’s a little embarrassing to admit that I breezed through several of these books in a matter of weeks.
The thing is, I identified with the protagonist. I have my own adopted red headed boy. Even though I wasn’t as old as the protagonist, I felt like I had started in on some things late in life. I found myself laughing along with the stories, and I will also say that for a secular book, the Christian author uses the themes of gospel, forgiveness, redemption, and struggle liberally. So consider this my confession: God kindled the flame of hope and joy in my heart with this bit of fiction that hit at just the right time in my life.
A Song
God also gave me a bit of a theme song for this season of my life. I love the music of Steve Green, even though his music is just a bit before my time. After a long Sunday, I often can only fall asleep wrapped in his music. One of his songs is called God Causes All Things to Grow, and it’s about the ebb and flow of marital love, and the faith we can have that God can take the faltering love we have for one another and grow it into something strong.
While this song focuses on marriage, God encouraged me in the ministry through the simple lyrics of the chorus. Releasing myself from my own expectations about what I should be accomplishing – which is an old sinful habit that frequently rears its ugly head – was part of the journey through discouragement. God causes all things to grow…it hit me square in the heart.
Surely some of my discouragement was rooted in my own self-dependency and lack of faith. Like Israel wandering in the wilderness, our faith falters in the face of new trials regardless of how often God has proven Himself faithful in the past. I don’t think that we can move through discouragement without a renewal of faith. Faith in God’s power, or faith in God’s goodness, or faith in God’s providence. This song helped (and helps) me overcome that lack of faith.
A Word from the Word
If I were reading this and didn’t know me, I might begin to suspect that this fellow has a bit of a sappy, emotional kind of Christianity. So for those who can’t quite see how a guilty pleasure novel or a song would help a pastor through discouragement, here is something far more solid and enduring: the Word of God. Pretty early on in this series of events, God directed me towards Psalm 37. I was particularly struck by verses 3-4:
Trust in the Lord, and do good;
dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness
Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart
The entirety of the Psalm helped me, but these verses felt very personal as I read them. Dwell in the land, and befriend faithfulness. “Don’t leave” the text seemed to admonish me. Leaving is, for the pastor, always the temptation, isn’t it? We can always tell ourselves that we aren’t doing good here anymore. Haven’t I given enough of my life to this ministry? But God doesn’t measure time like we do, so the twenty-five years that felt like a lifetime to me may not be that long to the Lord. Dwell in the land…
“Delight yourself in the Lord”. There is the joy that I knew I needed in order to pastor. Is it possible to find delight even amidst a series of trials? Of course it is, provided we are looking to the Lord for our joy. Could I preach with joy to a dwindling congregation? Absolutely.
Each phrase built on the others. Look to God. Trust in God. This was simply one of the clearest times in my Christian life that I felt as though God was giving me a specific direction for a specific circumstance in my life. In 2026, I still remind myself to dwell in the land, and befriend faithfulness.
Conclusion
Within the mysterious ways in which God restores His children, it is possible – and maybe even likely – that this child took note of lesser things, and that a more discerning person would have noted other ways in which God worked. Maybe I am like a child that on Christmas morning took more pleasure in the boxes and wrappings than in the gifts themselves. Either way, I am thankful.
Thankful that after twenty-seven years of ministry, God continues to patiently lead me, and to remind me that the church belongs to Him by blood. That I am only a servant. And on my sane days, like Paul, I am just grateful that He counted me worthy, putting me into the ministry.
If you are moving through your own season of discouragement, may my God lead you through your own path to joy and fruitfulness. The path may look different than mine, but our Guide is the same.
