So, I've now been back in harness for 16 days, and it has been pretty busy and very enjoyable.  None of it has been entirely 'routine' until this week, when normality is beginning to emerge afresh.  One of the things I am trying to do is to retore a greater sense of order and rhythm to my work patterns, which means being less reactive without becoming inflexible.

Way back when, I am led to believe, ministers spent the mornings in their studies reading, writing and beging holy.  Letters were written by church secretaries or even personal secretaries if the church was rich enough, and phone calls were likely to convey urgent news only.  In the afternoons they would visit their flock or, if myths are to be blieved, play golf.  There might be a midweek devotional meeting or an occasional Church or Deacons meeting of an evening.

We inhabit a very different world.  Emails arrive twenty four hours a day.  Answerphones or their digital equivalents allow constant access even we aren't physically there.  There is always something more that could be done, maybe should be done and it is too easy to slip and slide into a never ending morasse of more and more stuff.

So I am trying to be more disicplined.  I am mentally formulating a sort of timetable that will help protect me from my own worst excesses.  I have reduced some commitments from weekly to fortnightly.  I am investigating a more structured approach to some apsects of pastoral care.  I am needing to reinvent spaces for general reading as well as the specific, sermon-centred stuff.  I have always claimed a need for order, asserting that disorder is something I find stressful - one look at my desk and no-one believes that, but it is basically true.  I thrive best when I know where I am to be and what I am to be about, not in a legalistic, unbending way, but in an overall way.

This means that my current plan is that days will have definite focus, based on my priorities for ministry that week or that month, and within an overarching framework of what I am meant to be about.  This is, pretty much, a return to the pattern I sought to establish a decade back, and which got eroded as enthusiasm, workaholism and, more recently, long term effects of medical treatment overtook me.

It's not simply about working 'smarter' or more efficiently, it's about working sustainably and modelling something others might consider worthwhile.  It isn't easy - my enthusiasm outstrips my energy, my willingness exceeds my ability - but I am going to endeavour to live a more orderly life, which will mean that sometimes I actaully managed to string together the fourteenth and fifteenth letters of the alphabet into that difficult to utter word 'no'.