If someone challenged you to choose three words to describe Jesus, which would you pick?

Righteous?

Compassionate?

Loving?

All those would be good choices, but here’s another description that doesn’t usually make it to the top of our list.

Honest.

Jesus was honest. He told a woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more.” He called the Pharisees and Sadducees “a brood of vipers.” To their face.

Jesus didn’t mince words. He said, “I am the bread of life. . . . Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. . . . the one who feeds on me will live because of me. . . . Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.”

His teaching was so new, so fresh, so honest, that some who followed him walked away (John 6:35-60).

If you follow me on Facebook or heard me preach a couple of weeks ago, you know how moved I was by my first trip to Israel. Standing where the prophets walked, praying where Jesus stood, seeing the fields where first David and later the Christmas shepherds tended flocks—it was an experience I’ll never forget.

But meeting residents of Israel and Palestine—Jews, Muslims, and Christians, eating and talking with them in their homes and other informal settings—had the most profound impact on me. In this post I want to tell you what I learned from one of them.

Last week I took the risk of being real. I shared five confessions about myself and my feelings about ministry. Not because I’m in trouble or on the verge of quitting. But because ministry is hard, harder than those outside of ministry realize. I’m doing this in an effort to encourage other ministers who may be harboring and hiding some of these same thoughts.

Thank you for allowing me to be real. And think with me about five more confessions.

I’ve served in vocational ministry for 20 years, but usually I try to talk people out of going into full-time ministry. Not because we don’t need more ministers, but because most people outside of ministry don’t know the cost.

I didn’t either. When I was ordained, full of a vision to save the world, I didn’t know the toll or the challenge. I didn’t anticipate a day like I had not long ago. In one 24-hour period I went from speaking and leading in public, to walking through death and personal hell with people I love, to celebrating new life with another couple whose baby had just been born. The emotional peaks and valleys were like the highs and lows of an EKG.

Anyone who’s given their life to ministry knows ministry is tough. Honestly, it’s been really good for me, in many ways in many places. But I can honestly say the last two weeks have been the most emotionally trying in my 20 years of ministry.

The catalyst for my pain was the suffering of two families I love.