I watched a documentary recently about the extension of the Pacific Railroad across 1,900 miles of the American landscape. It was fascinating to imagine these pioneers making their way into uncharted territory. There was one man on the railroad crew who held the most dangerous and feared job—he carried the dynamite. The reason this job was so hazardous was that the dynamite was unpredictable and twitchy. If it got overheated or underheated or got bumped, the whole thing would go off . . . and the dynamite-man with it.

In a strange turn of events, it turns out the dynamite-man was almost always the chaplain. I laughed out loud at this little irony. That is, this man-of-the-cloth that most saw as a neutered, powerless fixture officiating weddings, funerals, and praying appropriate dinner time prayers was responsible for the power of the entire camp.

It got me thinking about the current landscape of pastors and our self-loathing, self-deprecating, self-criticizing hearts in which our greatest failure is mostly that we are forgetful. Forgetful that we carry the power of God with us, inside of us. Forgetful of our callings as prophetic voices in the wilderness—trading in our camel hair and honey for respectable offices and clean-lined sermons. Forgetful of our exile status, leading an exile people through Babylon. Forgetful that our God-hunger can never be satisfied by a clamoring “audience” and online metrics. Forgetful that fire resides in our bones. Forgetful that we are not running a general store called the church, but are inviting others to lay down their citizenship of earth and take up the one of heaven.

Forgetful that we carry dynamite. The dunamis of heaven.

I forget. Often.

I write this not as an offense or correction to my fellow pastor, but as a reminder to my frail heart that to carry the dunamis of God involves making a way through unknown territory by planting spiritual explosives in the rocky places of people’s hearts, lighting a fuse, and then heralding a land beyond what they do not yet see. Pastors are not primarily comforters in the wilderness who whisper platitudes. We are dynamite-men. Lighting fuses and waiting for the power of God to make a way into the promise land of faith.