Reflecting on Productivity, Priorities, and Possibilities

Another year comes to an end.

This has been one of those years that felt like it would never end (because of the pandemic), and yet it ended suddenly (how is that possible!?). Christmas came and it went.

Productivity

When I set out to face 2020, like you I had many ambitious plans. Plans that were altered suddenly by the novel coronavirus.

As I look back at 2020, this was my least productive year when it comes to writing. In a typical year since 2015, I have written hundreds of thousands of words and have had many of those words published as articles. This year, I only submitted one article to TGC, Helping Protect Your Pastor from Death by Suicide, and posted a few articles on my own blog here.

But that was it.

In other years, I’ve started on forthcoming book projects and have outlined new pieces, but this year I’ve felt creatively stunted and in need of a sabbath rest. With all of the added stressors and pressure of figuring out how to move church online, and with navigating church in a COVID-19 world, for many months I was working harder than any years in ministry before.

Priorities

So I gave up on creative productivity and output, and I spent most of my free time doing more intentional activities with my three boys, drawing, playing some chess, and I’ve even played some video games again. These mostly unproductive pursuits have replaced time I used to spend writing. For years I had a daily goal of free-writing a minimum of 500-1,000 words per day, and successfully did that. This year, most of the words I wrote down were my notes for Sunday sermons. Few words were written beyond that.

But overall, I’m satisfied with practically doing nothing “productive” in 2020. God has not engineered us to be robots, but he has made us to enjoy him forever. We aren’t wasting our lives when we waste some time—to the contrary, moments of exploration, learning, and/or doing nothing can all be ways of embracing our finite limitations as creatures. We are not valuable because we produce. We are valuable because we are made by God. We’re free to create, to pause, to cease, to rest. It’s by not doing that we exercise the great faith of confessing that God is God and we are not.

Possibilities

With that said, I do have a new goal for 2021. And that’s to finally launch a project I’ve been afraid of launching for several years. The project is called Outside Religion. It’s content that is primarily geared for those who feel like religious outsiders when it comes to church.

Back in 2019, I actually recorded a whole season of podcast episodes with an old friend who has experience counseling. Between my experiences in ministry and his in the therapy world, we had a blast recording these episodes and intersecting our work which involves people with topics of relevance and interest, however, my depression continued and every time I had a free moment to edit those episodes I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Depression sucks.

My goal is to release the first season of these unreleased episodes in January of 2021 and to continue to develop the podcast from there.

Look for the first season to drop.

Happy New Year!

Have you taken any time to reflect back on 2020? What goals do you have for 2021?