There are a number of reasons I usually avoid this forum, but I really do need some help, so here I humbly am.

I got email from one of my best friends at home. We went to the same church and were both very involved, etc. Steve wrote to say that our pastor, to whom I am very close and stay in decent contact with even though I have moved away, checked himself into the hospital for depression.

He is a gentle soul and truly pastoral, but he has been struggling for a while now. It's a humongous parish that draws members from all over a city of over a half million people. He is the most loving, caring person you will ever meet -- but he does NOT enjoy being an administrator, which is of course required of a pastor of a parish that size, and he really doesn't have the skills for it. He's been miserable for awhile. A few years ago, after the last time I was hospitalized for depression, he came to see me and we talked about it, and he told me of his depressions too, so since then we have tried to hold each other up as needed.

He was wonderful to me when I was so critically physically ill and spent more than a month in the hospital -- I was out of it for a long time, but nurses told me when I finally started regaining reasonable consciousness that he would just come and sit with me, talk to me, hold my hand for a while, and pray. Once I was reasonably alert most of the time, he came at least every other day and stayed for at least half an hour, just being a comforting presence. I went downhill pretty quick after I was admitted, and friends told me he made an announcement at every service that first weekend asking the parish to pray for me.

He isn't accepting calls or visitors, not that I could visit from 4 hours away, and I just don't know what to do besides ask you to keep this kind man in your thoughts as he works his way through something so many of us are so familiar with.

Thanks.

Candy