Mixing Business with Ministry

My job is to create a place for groups to come and retreat, to set them up for an experience where their campers can hear the gospel and experience spiritual growth in their relationship with Jesus, strengthen their friendships and have a really good fun time.

This is close to my heart. I love that my job is this. I love that I get to come alongside church leaders and help them create an experience that changes people's lives forever.

But,

There is always a but.


But, there are hard parts to this process. I work with contracts, money, budgets. I have to make sure that the money and people are here to keep this place going.

This is the hard part of my job.  This is where my heart rips out of my chest when I have to have a non-profit that they have to give us money for people who didn't come to camp because their contract says so. This is where I have to say, "I have to under deliver what has been promised to you"

Camp isn't cheap. A weekend away costs about $160-$220 a person pending on what housing they want. That is a lot of money. I want people to have an amazing experience for paying that.

I feel like this year's theme is hard conversations. Where giving grace has biten me in the butt, and I feel completely drained by having to have these conversations over and over again.

Camp is always busy, and it is so easy to get behind. But I feel like I am more than behind, I almost feel lost in the dust.

The tasks of the job isn't hanging me up. It is the heart ache. I am started to feel sick by all the hard conversations I have to have. I feel like I am underdelevering and hurting people, when that is the last thing that I want to do, I just feel like I have no other choice.

I cant remember things. I can't be the person that I want to be in my head. I feel like I am losing (or completely lost, I'm not sure where the line is) in ministry and that I just use that word to cover up all the hidden business that I am doing.

Our board of directors are pressuring our director to make all this more money for camp, and that trickles down to him urging me to make more money for camp. and I am looking at the calendar and I really don't know how to do it. I don't know how to book our rooms better, I don't know how to get us to a place where they want us to be. And what is really hard for me, is that, I feel like we are in such a good place. I feel like I did a stellar job, way better than before, in booking church groups. We have so many more people signed up this year than last year, but it is not enough. I feel like no matter what I do, it will never be enough.

All of these small pressures keep coming my way, our lawyer needing to rewrite our contract for a group, a group dropping out last minute, a group not having enough people. Running out of housing, etc etc. I feel like all these things are flying at me constantly, and I lost what God does here.

I love business, but mixing business with ministry is really hard for me. I don't know how to blend them. I don't know how to both trust God in what I do and ensure that the bottom line is met.

This struggle is real. And as I sit here, I am realizing that writing about it, won't suddenly give me an answer of how to make it all better. It is bigger than the 20 minutes I spent in writing this blog. It snipets of these thoughts have been in my head for weeks/months but looking at it connected. I think I have a bigger problem on my hands than I realized.

I am sure I will have to come back and revisit this, I need to see some clarity in this. I think this might be one of the reasons that I am doing so poorly. This may be a significant factor in why I am feeling like I am going through a mid-life crisis.