There was a stretch in South Korea — about three months — where I didn’t have a single day off. Seven days a week, every week, for three months straight. Looking back now, that’s exactly what a workaholic dad’s schedule looks like, even though at the time it just looked like faithfulness.
It wasn’t because I couldn’t say no. It was funerals. In our church, that season happened to bring a kind of domino effect among our elderly members — one after another, week after week, and for some reason it kept landing on a Sunday or a Monday. In Korea, a funeral runs three days — 삼일장 (sam-il-jang), we call it — and as a pastor, you’re going back and forth across all three days of it.
I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a complaint. Sitting with a family in loss is one of the most serious things a pastor does. We believe the person who died is already home — in the arms of Jesus, past needing anything from us. The funeral isn’t for them. It’s for the ones left behind, the ones who need to hear that this isn’t the end of the story, that there’s a reunion coming, that the grief in front of them isn’t the last word. That work matters. I’d do every one of those three-day funerals again, without hesitation, exactly as they happened.
But a sam-il-jang isn’t a single service. It’s three days you keep returning to — visiting hours, the service itself, the burial — and when they landed back-to-back-to-back, week after week, for a stretch of elderly members that just happened to cluster that way, there was no seam left anywhere in the week for anything else. One family’s three days would barely close before the next family’s three days opened. I wasn’t choosing between funerals and rest. I was choosing between funerals and everything else in my life, over and over, for three months, and every single time the funeral was the obviously correct choice to make. That’s what made it so hard to see as a problem while it was happening.
But three months without a day off doesn’t just cost you rest. It costs you your family, in ways you don’t notice until someone else says it out loud.
What Being a Workaholic Dad Actually Looked Like
I lived three minutes from the church I served. Three minutes — close enough that “going home” and “going to work” barely functioned as different sentences. The older members of the congregation had my number, and when their phone or their computer gave them trouble, they’d call me — not the church office, me. When someone needed help, our pastoral staff were glad to give it; serving them that way was a joy, not a burden. Someone’s printer wouldn’t connect. Someone couldn’t figure out a video call with their son overseas. Small things, technically. But I was three minutes away and I always answered, so I was always the one who went.
And I went. Every time. On what should have been a day out with my family, I’d get the call and go anyway, because refusing felt like failing the very people I was supposed to be serving. I didn’t miss a single calling, because that’s what I believed being a pastor meant.
On top of the funerals, there was everything else that doesn’t pause for them: the sermons — four or five a week between morning services, Wednesday worship, and Sunday — the discipleship meetings, the counseling, the lectures, the caring ministry. I did all of it. I prepared for all of it. And for a long time, I told myself I was fine, because I was getting it all done, and getting it all done felt like proof I was doing this right.
That’s the part about being a workaholic dad nobody warns you about going in. It doesn’t feel like a problem while it’s happening. It feels like faithfulness. It feels like value. And in a church, that feeling gets confirmed from the outside, too — people notice the pastor who never says no, and they say so, and it’s meant as a compliment, and it lands as one. There are environments where showing up for absolutely everything really is the right call, where it’s not a symptom of anything, it’s just faithfulness. Ministry can look exactly like one of those environments from the inside, even in the months it’s quietly costing you something else entirely — the same way staying physically present isn’t the same as being emotionally there with your own kids.
The Question That Actually Stopped Me
During that season, my oldest son — he was still young enough to be working out what any of this even meant, still learning who Jesus was and what it meant to be saved — asked my wife a question one morning as I was leaving for church again.
“Is Dad going to his house?”
He wasn’t trying to say anything profound. He was just asking a real question, the way kids do when the facts in front of them don’t add up to what they’ve been told. And the facts, from where he was standing, were these: Dad wakes up, dad goes to that building, dad comes home late or not at all, dad sleeps over sometimes. If you were four or five years old watching that pattern, “is Dad going to his house?” is actually the more reasonable question than “dad’s going to work.”
I wasn’t in the room when he asked it. My wife told me later. And it hit me harder than almost anything else from that season — harder than the exhaustion, harder than the sermon count. Because he wasn’t wrong. Not about the building being my house. About what he’d pieced together from watching me live. I was, functionally, a guy who slept over at his own home sometimes. Church was where I actually lived. Home was where I visited.
He was still learning what any of this meant — who Jesus was, what salvation even is, all of it still forming in a four-year-old’s mind. So of course his question came out simple. But that’s exactly what made it impossible to argue with. He wasn’t making a theological point or trying to guilt me. He was just reporting what he saw, the way kids do before they’ve learned to soften an observation for the adult it’s about. And what he saw was a pattern clear enough that “is Dad going to his house?” was the more sensible read of it than “dad’s going to work.”
I don’t think there was a single moment where I decided that was an acceptable trade. It happened the way most workaholism happens — one legitimate yes at a time, each one defensible on its own, until they added up to a life your own son couldn’t quite place you inside of. Nobody sits down one day and chooses to become a stranger in his own house. You just keep saying yes to the next real, serious thing, and one morning your kid asks your wife a two-second question that tells you exactly where you actually live.
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Then
I’m not writing this to tell you ministry work is the problem, or that showing up for grieving families was somewhere I went wrong. It wasn’t. The problem was never any single yes. It was that I never asked what all of them, stacked together, were actually costing at home — until a four-year-old asked a simple question that answered it for me.
That question followed me out of Korea. It’s part of why what happened next — moving our family across the world into a completely different pace of life — ended up meaning more than I expected. Not because we went looking for an escape from any of this. We didn’t; that’s its own story. But once we were there, in a place that simply couldn’t run at the speed I was used to, I found out how much of “full-time pastor” had actually just been a workaholic dad wearing a pastor’s schedule. Workaholism isn’t really measured in hours — it’s the inability to disengage even when nothing’s asking you to stay — which tracks exactly with what those three months were.
For now, I’ll just say this: if you’re a dad reading this who’s proud of never missing a single call, a single meeting, a single yes — ask the people who live in your house what building they think you live in. You might not like the answer. I didn’t.
I’m not telling you to say no to the funerals, or the emergency calls, or whatever your version of them is. I said yes to every one of mine and I stand by it. What I’m telling you is that faithfulness to the work and faithfulness to your family were never actually competing for the same hours in my head — I never once did the math that way. I just kept adding up individually correct decisions until they became a wrong life. If there’s one thing worth taking from three months without a day off, it’s that: the problem is rarely any single yes. It’s that nobody’s counting the total but you, and it’s easy to stop counting.
