Mr. Minister

Tonight we went to dinner with my fiancée’s mother and her new(ish) boyfriend. The interesting thing about her boyfriend is that he is a minister for the uniting church. Ok, so maybe it’s not interesting to people who regularly attend church, but as a non-church-going kind of person I find it interesting because it’s not a job that I know a lot about and it affords me the opportunity to learn something about a career/lifestyle that I wouldn’t know otherwise.

The thing with this guy is, when I first met him, he seemed really nice. Friendly and generous and maybe a little too attentive to everything you say. You expect that from someone whose job is somewhat equivalent to that of a councillor. We’ve now spent a bit more time with him and I find that every time we come away from a meeting with him I like him a little less. I feel uncomfortable around him and I think it’s because as someone who listens a lot, he’s not great when you put him in a position where he has to speak about himself. He keeps looking at me like he’s waiting for me to spill my guts about something. I feel uncomfortable around him because he is constantly looking at me as though we’re having a very serious conversation, even when we’re not.

It’s a strange and difficult sort of thing to explain, because rather than being a specific sort of behaviour or quirk about him that makes me feel uncomfortable, it’s just a sort of feeling that I get when I come away from seeing him.

Something that left me feeling a bit odd was that I asked him tonight about his job and what that involved other than the obvious things. Naturally he asked me what the obvious things were and I explained that I meant that everyone knows what a ministers job involves on a Sunday and when there are weddings, funerals etc., but he is paid by the church to do a full time job and I wasn’t sure what else was involved. He told me that it involved a lot of preparation for his sermons, a lot of meeting with people in a councillor type of role, and various other church related duties. Then at the end of explaining all of this he said something strange that went along the lines of ‘So have I justified myself to you?’

What the hell does that mean? Does the fact that he’s a minister mean that I’m not allowed to ask him about his job? If he was a butcher, an accountant or the international liaison for a famous sock importing company, I would ask him the same question. Would he feel like I was asking him to justify his job if he was an accountant? No one else that I have ever asked about their job has ever responded like that to talking about what they do for a living and it is making me a little crazy. It’s making me angry and crazy because I shouldn’t come away from an innocent family dinner feeling like I’ve been judged by him for being curious about his work.

It was all round a very odd and unsettling dinner with Mr. Minister’s weirdness and also with my fiancée’s mum’s behaviour. I’m not going to get into what happened with her because I hate ranting like this and if I start I know that I will go on for hours. Suffice to say that the whole night left me wishing that we’d just gone to McDonalds for a $5 burger meal, a quick conversation and an early night in.