I love being a pastor. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I truly love it. One of the reasons I love it so much is because of divine moments. I think we all probably intuitively realize that there is a portion of our time that we spend on things that don’t really matter…things that we do in this life that probably don’t have much eternal significance. Now, I do think we need to be careful in this respect. There are a lot of things that seem mundane that may be extremely important. There also may be a number of things that we do that seem really important that are actually rather insignificant. That however, is a different blog post for another time.

I love divine moments. The moments that you get to be a part of that you know have eternal significance. Where the veil that separates heaven and earth seems to be a little bit thinner. I get to have a lot of these. Moments like…

Praying for a single mom who is going through a hard time.

Counselling a couple whose marriage is on the ropes and is looking for a reason not to quit.

Officiating a wedding where the sense of love and God’s presence could be cut with a knife.

Facilitating a church service that ushers hope into a weary soul.

The list could go on and on. I love that I have a job that encourages me to focus on and pray for moments like these. In Luke 10:27, Jesus summed up the purpose of our existence: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'” He said that this is the summation of God’s will for our lives. Love God. Love people.

These are the guardrails for our lives and between them we find the divine moments I’m talking about.

There is nothing as beautiful as someone experiencing the love of God for the first time. Or someone who has never had love or acceptance finding true community and friendship for the first time ever. Divine moments.

There is a lot about being a pastor that is extremely challenging. That is a post for another day as well. What keeps me going though–what fires me up more than anything else–are the divine moments.

I fight for them. I pray for them. I savor each and every one because I know they will reverberate through eternity. Someday this life will be over, even though sometimes we don’t want to admit it. I believe we’ll find out that there were things that we spent our time on that really mattered, and that there were other things we spent our time on that didn’t matter at all. I want to be as regret-free as possible on that day. I want to have led a life full of divine moments.

One of the deepest regrets I could possibly imagine is the regret of a wasted life. A life spent on things that really didn’t matter all that much. I can’t imagine the weight of knowing that the majority of my time was spent in vain. Some will feel that weight unfortunately, but I certainly don’t want to be one of them.

You certainly don’t have to work as a pastor to have a life full of divine moments, but you should be focused on them. So what about you? What was the last divine moment that you had? What can you do to create more of them today?