Ministry Everywhere

While in Dunedin we met a man staying overnight in our backpacker from Auckland. He was in Dunedin on a business trip rather than holiday, so we was an outlier in the backpacker culture. We got to talking and he found out that I am a pastor-to-be. He mentioned that his father had been a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor, so he had been raised as a minister’s kid.

He had a taste for discussion of philosophy, so we rambled on about it for a while. At length he asked if I wanted to play checkers (there was a chess and checkers board at the backpacker), and I agreed to it. It turned out he was rather good at the game—he said from hours of playing on the computer at work—and so I learned a few of the basics of strategy from him. It had been years and years since I’d played the game.

When it was discovered that I was willing to engage in philosophical discussion and that I was a sort of Christian thinker, he turned our discussion towards the problem of evil in the world, and then further to the matter of ethics. As the conversation progressed, it seemed that his interest in good, evil and ethics was not simply academic—then again, for whom is it truly academic? He alluded to a few dilemmas in which he found himself, especially given his current line of work in the stock market and investments. He observed that it was difficult to be an economist and stock market player without succumbing to, or at least supporting, human greed and selfishness.

Though we were not able to solve any of the world’s big problems, I came away from that long, deep conversation with a greater appreciation for how some people walk through life with more questions than answers. Some of those questions can cut to the very quick of how and why we live the way we do. I reckon the world tends to give greater value to answers than to the questions, which might make it difficult to ask the really tough questions. Nonetheless, if there are others like this man from Auckland out there in the world, there is a market for folks who are willing to wrestle with the big overarching challenges of life. And for those who are willing to listen and help others in their own wrestling matches.

~emrys