Cordell Strug served as a Lutheran pastor for almost twenty-eight years in rural Minnesota. In these stories and reflections, he gives a picture of a pastor's life from the inside. He writes of sitting with the dying and meeting with the angry, of visiting shut-ins and writing sermons, of lonely drives over frozen roads, of work he can't finish and wounds he can't heal. He is candid about what surprised or bothered him, about his misjudgments and failures, about the ever-growing weight of stress and sorrow. He tells who inspired him and who drove him nuts, which advice he found priceless and which he found useless. He shows the ideals of faith colliding with the realities of life in the struggling congregations he served.