Dear Jerry,

You were kind enough in the midst of all your trouble to ask me how I was. Do you know how much that meant to me? I spend all day every day with people who are in some kind of need. Maybe they want to join the Church or have a baby baptised. Most often they are ill and I am sitting by a hospital bed, sometimes they are really scared, sometimes drawing close to death. Often there are weeping relatives to deal with and minister to. Frequently I am in the midst of death, making arrangements, offering comfort as best I can and always, but always, praying.

This isn’t a complaint, you understand? It is just an observation about Ministry. Seldom if ever does anyone minister to me. Seldom, I can probably count it on one hand, have people actually genuinely enquired after my own well being.

And often, I crave for someone to listen to my difficulties. As you know for nine months now the Doctor has been struggling to bring down my blood pressure. Every medication has either failed to work or else I have had a dreadful reaction to it. The last one did nothing to bring down the HBP, but it did bring me out in a dreadful red blistery body rash. I stopped those tablets three weeks ago and still the itching is driving me to distraction. I also struggle, really struggle with my U.C. and my asthma and the steroids. By and large I feel grim most days but nobody knows, nobody asks( steroids make you look really well and fat!). I am phoned at meal times, phoned before I wake up in the morning and after I have gone to sleep. My house is not my own, my time is certainly not my own. I can’t remember when I last had a full day to myself. Money is always tight and always an issue. And sometimes just sometimes it would be nice to have a moan about the stress relating to ministry and sometimes it would nice if I could pour it out and let it be hung out in someone else’s back yard to bother them… and it would be nice if someone prayed about these issues for me and over me.

However let me get this in perspective. I am just having a moan because I am over tired trying to cope with the demands at both ends of the day. I know people pray for me. I know people care. But, you know, whether it is your neighbour, your minister, your priest or your friend it is good to listen, good to ask good to be interested in other people and their needs. How often though people are only concerned about their own well being, their own problems and never listen. I have a very very close relative who doesn’t listen at all, if you try to tell her something, her eyes glaze over.

This is not the way it should be among Christians.

However the welfare of others is always of paramount importance. I was thinking back over some of my ordination vows, this morning. I took them one beautiful summer evening in St Kiaran’s Church on Islay many years ago now.

The one really important question for me in it all of it was this one:

The answer was and is "They are".

I have tried to the very best of my ability to live like that every day, which is one of the reasons I spend my life listening, listening, listening to others. May you also learn to listen every day.

I hope you don’t regret asking me!

May this find you and Zoe well,

Stuart