Ministry vs Work: hours for money given vs hours for money earned

One of the things that I often find difficult is this: if I were working for a company (say, Wal-mart), I’d put in my 40 hours a week and go home, and forget work. There would be a clear and easy delineation between “work” and “home” – you hired me for X hours, you get X hours, and that’s it.

But when I’m doing a ministry to which someone is contributing, it becomes harder to say “I’ll only put in 40 hours, and then I go home.”

Part of this is because I’m passionate about what I do. In that regard, it’s rather like a startup that a founder is passionate about, I suppose. And founders don’t work 40 hours a week – a lot of founders will put in double that.

But part of it, I think, is a kind of qualitative difference between money earned, money invested and money donated. When money is donated you can start to feel a little guilty – like you’re not “giving back” enough hours to equate to the value of the money.

I’ve not found a very good solution to the feelings that arise out of this – largely because I’m more a Thinking person than a Feeling person.

One thing I’ve done is to mentally acknowledge as a policy that a certain number of hours belong to family. At bare minimum, this is a responsibility and obligation.

Another thing is to try to adopt the mental viewpoint that people are donating to the ministry I am doing rather than to me. (This also makes it easier to ask people to support the ministry, because the ministry is valuable – it’s not making a value statement about me).

Another is to remember that people don’t expect you to work 120 hours a week - although many actually do, because you’re in ministry.

How do you deal with this? Do you run into people who have unrealistic work expectations of you, because you are doing some kind of ministry-related work?