A Long Drive for a Short Visit
On the math the calendar can't do
Recently I drove an hour to a hospital ahead of a procedure. The visit lasted longer than I expected, but no one would have called it long. Loved ones were present. Prayer, conversation, the kind of presence that doesn’t require a script. Then I drove home.
The calendar math on a trip like that doesn’t add up. Two hours of windshield time for what most people would describe as a brief encounter. There were emails I could have answered in those two hours. A sermon I could have edited. Phone calls I could have returned. By any productivity logic, sending a card and a text would have done most of what was needed.
Except it wouldn’t have.
There’s a line that keeps coming back to me. A trip like that is the kind of thing that’s easy to second-guess on the calendar and hard to regret once you’ve done it.
The discipline of pastoral presence is not the discipline of doing more. It’s the discipline of recognizing which moments the calendar can’t measure. Some encounters require physical proximity. Some prayers need to be prayed in the same room. Some news needs to arrive on someone’s doorstep instead of in their inbox. Trying to translate those moments into a more efficient form usually subtracts something the people on the other end can feel even when they can’t name it.
This isn’t only a clergy problem. Anyone who has weighed the trip to a hospital, the funeral two states away, or the friend in crisis across town, anyone who has asked whether a phone call would do, has run some version of the same calendar math. The honest answer is that the phone call would do, in a literal sense. The voicemail would communicate. The card would arrive. None of those alternatives are wrong.
What changes is what gets carried forward. I learned this early in ministry from other clergy who demonstrated by example and encouraged me to do the same. I like being efficient, and the practice didn’t always make sense to me. They made the trips anyway. They kept saying it made a difference. I’ve come to know it from experience since, partly from the trips I’ve taken and partly from a few important visits I missed.
That morning visit won’t show up in any metric anyone tracks. No one in that hospital room will remember the exact words of any prayer. They won’t think back on the conversation as the thing that changed everything. By the calendar, that hour was less productive than the hour I gave up to drive there. By the kind of math the calendar can’t do, it was the one thing that needed to happen before lunch.
The problem with this discipline is that you can never quite prove you got it right. The trips you don’t make rarely come back to haunt you in any traceable way. The trips you do make rarely produce evidence dramatic enough to vindicate the time. You’re left to trust that the hour was worth the math you couldn’t justify on paper.
Easy to second-guess. Hard to regret.
When something inside you says go anyway, that’s worth listening to.