A New Pastor?

The pastor of our church has recently retired and we are meeting the pastoral candidate this week and voting next Sunday whether he will be our new pastor. Brian is at a men's breakfast this morning eating pancakes with him, and I will meet him tomorrow when he preaches at the Sunday service. This is not a new event for me. My daddy was a church planter which means he started the churches and then helped them bring in a new pastor once they were established and went off to start a new church. This is my first pastor search since having a preemie, though, and I find myself wondering different things. When Noah was in the hospital we had a lot of clergy visits both from pastors at our church and others we are associated with and the hospital chaplains. I had never realized what an important part of pastoral ministry hospital visitation can be, and I find myself wondering more about this genteman's compassion than whether his sermons have 3 main points. Even now that Noah's older I am much more in need of caring words and gentle understanding that I ever have before. I have high hopes for this gentleman because he has been a hospital chaplain and must have some understanding of what my life has been like over the last few years. The fact that he was a hopital chaplain also makes me wonder if he was in fact THE hospital chaplain who came as an ethics committee representative when they were trying to convince us to disconnect Noah's life support. I find myself hoping that he is so that he can see that we made the right choice. Noah certainly isn't in a chronic vegetative state like they told us he would be, and when the neurologist gave us his MRI results I didn't hear him mention the word "mush" even once when refering to Noah's brain.