Grab that cup of coffee or whatever beverage suits you this time of day. I want to talk about something that doesn’t get said out loud very often in ministry circles, but probably should.

Before we dig in too deeply here this one is a shout out to my ministry friends. I’ve been there. I know the feeling. While my ministry now isn’t this way, it wasn’t too long ago that I had to listen to my own advice – which is why I’m sharing this with you today.

Easter Sunday is one of the best days of the year to be in ministry. Busy but the best kind of busy!

The room is full. Not just full, but full-full. Cars wrapping around the lot. Extra chairs in the aisles. Don’t tell the fire inspector. Familiar faces you haven’t seen in months sitting next to guests you’ve never met. The music is faster, a little louder, and the singing…wow the singing is on point. There’s this moment, usually somewhere in the opening hymn, where you can actually feel it. The room comes alive. It seems like everyone brought someone. Everyone is leaning in. And you’re standing up front thinking, now this is why I do this.

I’ve had those mornings. They’re real, and they’re genuinely good.

And then two or three weeks pass.

The lot has open spots again. The second row is half empty. The singing is…well, it’s fine. It’s your people. But it’s noticeably quieter than it was. The energy that felt almost electric three weeks ago has settled back into something more familiar, more ordinary. Normal.

Nobody warns you about the whiplash. This is not taught in any seminary class that I took.

I’m not talking about the numbers. I mean the feeling. The emotional and spiritual disorientation that comes from going, in the span of a few weeks, from the highest-energy Sunday of the year to what feels like the congregation just sort of… exhaled. Ministry leaders don’t always have language for it. It doesn’t feel like grief exactly, but it’s in that neighborhood. It doesn’t feel like discouragement exactly, but it can get there fast if you’re not careful.

Here’s what makes it harder: you can’t really talk about it. I mean seriously you can’t stand up on a Sunday in May and say “Hey, it felt way better in here three weeks ago.” You can’t let your team see you struggling with it because the room that’s in front of you is full of real people with real lives, and they need you present, not pining for a different version of the room. So you tuck it away. You preach as well as you can. You shake hands at the door. And somewhere underneath all of that, you’re quietly wrestling with something you can’t quite name.

I want to name it. Because I think a lot of ministry leaders carry this alone, and they don’t need to.

A few things that have helped me:

Remember what Easter actually measures. Easter attendance is a snapshot of curiosity and relationship, not a ceiling or a floor. The people who came because a family member invited them…that’s not nothing. That’s a door cracking open. The question isn’t why didn’t they come back, it’s what are we doing the other 51 Sundays that makes it worth coming back to? Easter doesn’t set the ceiling. It shows you what’s possible.

Name the thing to yourself. You don’t have to perform resilience. If the drop hits you then let it hit you, name it for what it is, and don’t spiritualize it into something it’s not. The emotional weight of caring deeply about a room full of people in need of the good news of Jesus is not a weakness. It’s actually evidence that you’re the right person for the job.

Anchor to the people in the room. One of the disciplines I keep coming back to is to stop looking at what’s missing and look at who’s there. There are people in your congregation on a random Sunday in May who are holding things together by a thread. They’re navigating rocky marriages, diagnoses, doubts and they showed up anyway. That room is not a consolation prize. It’s a gift.

Stay connected to your why, not your how many. The “how many” will fluctuate for your entire ministry. It always has. It always will. The leaders who make it to the long end of this work are almost always the ones who found something deeper than merely attendance metrics to stand on. Not because numbers don’t matter, because they do, but because numbers alone will eat you alive if you let them.

This one’s for the leaders who had a great Easter and then felt strangely quiet about it two weeks later. You’re not alone in that. And the ordinary Sunday in front of you? It matters more than it feels like it does right now. I think Mordecai’s words to Esther belong to all of us who get caught up in last week instead of loving the people in front of us this week. You were placed here for such a time as this.