Everybody needs a pastor. A pastor is probably not someone you sit and listen to every week at church or on TV, but you need a real "spiritual overseer", someone you know and who knows you, someone to pray with and cry with and to be accountable to. In most cases, this is not the minister at your church.
This may be your best friend, if your best friend is not just the person you eat, shop, and gossip with (not that there is not a time and place for that); but ONLY if you talk with your best friend about the little things in your life. By little things, I mean the big things. The things that you secretly worry about at night (Worries like "Is that spot on my back cancer>", "Does my kid have a learning disability?" or "Should marriage be this hard?").
If you are a Christian, this person should be able to talk you down from those emotional cliffs in a sensible and Biblical way. I have a pastor, maybe a few pastors in my life, and none of them are my husband or my church pastors. Don't get me wrong. I love listening to the sermons at my church. I often find great spiritual truths in them that I can apply to my life, but those are not the people I share my real spiritual life with. In fact, I've always hated "pastoral visits" where you pretend to tell your pastor your problems so they can pray with you. I can't really share my spiritual journey with someone in a 1 hour luncheon.
The deepest, most memorable, spiritual conversations I've had with my "pastors" has been sitting by the hot tub debating whether God has ONE plan for my life or if there is more than one RIGHT path. Some of the most heart wrenching sermons have taken place on the couch at the vacation condo, spilling my heart to my "pastors." The real convictions come out when my "pastor" is calling me out about something over a cup of coffee. I don't always know the right answers afterwards, but I know that someone who knows God and knows me, knows my heart. And they will follow up on our conversation, supporting and loving me all the way. That's a pastor.
As a pastor's wife, I keep hearing about the stress in many pastor's lives, and I sincerely think it's because they often don't have their own pastor. Someone has to be the pastor's pastor. Who can it be? It usually can't be a church member, because if you knew the humanity of your pastor, it might be hard to still put them on that pastoral pedestal (which they shouldn't be on anyway). A pastor may have another pastor as their pastor. That sometimes works well, because they understand the calling and the person. A pastor may have a best friend from childhood as their pastor. That person knew them before they had a "title." We are more than our titles. We are people and we are pastors. And I believe EVERYBODY needs a pastor.
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