The last two decades have given rise to a proliferation of books on burnout and self-care. There is much help to be found in some of these works, particularly those written from a Christian perspective. We need reminders like the title of Kelly Kapic’s recent book: You Were Never Meant to Do It All. We need to come to terms with the ways that the cultural idol of busyness—wedded to digital technologies like social media and the smartphone—has left our souls in a restless, exhausted frenzy. We need to remember our finitude when it comes to abilities, relationships, time, and energy.
I’m all for that.
But as with everything, fallen humans (even after being redeemed) tend to swing from one extreme to the other. I’ve done it in this area—reading a stack of books on burnout and beginning to imperceptibly live as if the chief end of man is to take care of himself and preserve himself forever.
After five years as your pastor, I still feel like I haven’t quite figured this out. I tend to swing back and forth between being overly (even idolatrously?) concerned about my physical and psychological health to being somewhat reckless with it in service to Christ. That recklessness then leads to a mild crash and burn, which causes me to swing back in the other direction.
Is there a happy medium between the two? Maybe.
Christopher Ash has written one of the most helpful books on the subject of burnout, and in it he advocates for what he calls “sustainable sacrifice.” What I so appreciate about Ash’s book is that he doesn’t blush in telling us that Jesus calls His followers to self-sacrifice, not self-preservation. But he steers us away from a kind of reckless self-sacrifice that ends up crippling us from serving the Lord for the long haul.
Sustainable sacrifice is a happy medium—and a biblical one, for that matter!
But I find it incredibly hard to figure out what that actually looks like on the ground in my day-to-day life and ministry. Since I struggle to find the sweet spot and remain there, I’ve decided I’d rather err on the side of recklessness for Jesus and not live to see my fortieth birthday (as was true of many of my spiritual heroes, including Jesus Himself!) than to be useless for Jesus and live for a century. I concur with Thomas Manton: “It is better to be worn out with labor than eaten out with rust and consumed with idleness.”
If sustainable sacrifice can be obtained, great! But if not, far better to burn out being used than to rust out being useless!
All for Jesus! All for Jesus!
All my being’s ransomed pow’rs,
all my thoughts and words and doings,
all my days and all my hours.
Yours in Christ,
Pastor Nick