Just posted this video. It is part of an assignment for one of the courses I am currently taking at Wesley Seminary.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about spiritual disciplines…how they work, what they accomplish, and how they take shape in your life. If you’d like to join the conversation, leave a comment below.
Six months ago I had a meltdown. An entire year of busy running coupled with the neglect of my spiritual life and physical health led to ministry burnout. Once I hit the wall, I began the process of pursuing recovery. Since that time, I have reflected on the specifics of what led to the depletion of my emotional, spiritual, and physical resources. I identified five key factors that contributed to my downward spiral. I share them here as warning signs for all of us to pay attention to.
1. Extra Stress
What set the stage for my burnout was the transition from leading a church to the role of leading at the district level. This transition with its steep learning curve and new city, house, school district, church affiliation, and friendships led to a stressful season of life. Everything was new and different, and that was difficult to experience.
Extra stress is not to be avoided at all costs. Sometimes we need to go through those stressful seasons to reach our potential or land in the place we need to be. However, we need to pay attention to the reality of that extra stress so that we can compensate for it with extra rest and times with God that are restorative. I had extra stress and did not pay attention to it, nor did I take the steps to offset that stress so I could remain healthy.
2. Busy Pace of Life
Connected with the extra stress of transition, I was busy…too busy. Full-time job, full-time in seminary, coaching leaders 2 to 4 hours per week, and serving on the leadership team for the coaching network in my denomination. Oh yeah, and I was trying to be a good husband and father at the same time. I had a lot to do and was working hard to stay on top of it all. This busy pace of life led to early mornings, late nights, and long hours at the office. I was busy and eventually that pace caused my engines to sputter, miss, and eventually shut down.
Again, it is not wrong to be busy with important things to complete. However, we must be careful that busy is not our only speed. Busy must be balanced with Sabbath, relaxation, and fun…three terms I was completely disconnected from during the year that led to my meltdown.
3. Ignoring Physical Health
Prior to the transition of roles I had a good discipline for diet and physical exercise. When we transitioned and the stress dial got turned up and the busyness took over my schedule I looked for things to cut. The first thing to go was sleep. I decided to get up earlier and stay up later…and drink more coffee to fuel the insanity. The second thing to go was my diet. I starting eating foods for the taste and comfort they provided instead of eating them for the way they fueled my energy. The third thing to go was my workout routine. To be clear there were days and weeks over the course of that year where I worked out, but it was not consistent. Eventually working out came to be a foreign concept.
So here’s the bottom line lesson in this area: If you sleep four to five hours a night, eat junk, and never workout, you will lack the energy to keep going. You are also eliminating the very resources that help you deal with the extra stress that you may be experiencing in life.
4. Overcommitment and No Focus
The role I stepped into was a new position, and while there were some parameters for what this job would cover, a lot of it was to be created along the way. I knew this up front and agreed to walk through that process. Over the course of the first year, I was given 12 major areas of responsibility. While I don’t recommend that you allow your job to have 12 major areas of responsibility (5 to 7 is better), this is not what took me under. What impacted me was the fact that I overestimated my capacity to keep up with other commitments outside of my work responsibilities. I came into the role as a full-time seminary student, self-leadership coach with Keep Growing, Inc., church planting coach and leadership team member for the Wesleyan Coaching Network. I assumed that I could keep all those going at the same level I had before while learning a new job and keeping up with those new responsibilities. I could not. All totaled, I was trying to focus on 18 to 20 areas of focus. That many areas of focus means that you really have no focus. I was busy, and I was running from here to there and there to here. These two realities – overcommitment and no focus – sapped my passion and made me feel overwhelmed. This added to my stress, busyness, and overall sense of being tired.
The lesson I have learned here is that I need to keep a complete inventory of all my areas of responsibility and commitments in those areas. I need to review that inventory on a weekly basis. And I need to consider what impact new opportunities or projects will have on my life and leadership.
By the way, I have re-defined my role to have six major areas of responsibility. I am getting ready to begin an undetermined hiatus from my coaching of church planters and work with the Wesleyan Coaching Network. And I have developed a plan to stay on top of my seminary work without it consuming my schedule. It is not enough to identify the problems; you have to make the necessary changes.
5. Disconnection from People
I am an introvert, but I am relational. I get my energy from being alone to re-charge, but I need close relationships to stay healthy. When we moved into this new role, it was the first time in our lives where we were not integrally involved in one single local church. For the previous twelve years I had served as pastor of a local church. Prior to that, since the day I was born, I had always been highly involved and connected with whatever church I was attending. Now my wife and I found ourselves driving an hour to church, which allowed us to attend worship, but did not provide any kind of meaningful connection with people. Small groups happened during the week and extra activities were other days and times. It was not feasible for us to be fully engaged or connected. We were lonely. On top of that, the close friends I had were now a distance from where I was. I was lonely.
When you are going through major transition or any difficult time, you need the strength of others to help carry you through. If you find yourself disconnected from people, beware. You might be in a compromising situation. If a major storm or challenge bombards your life, will you have the support network to rely on for strength, prayer, comfort, and help? I did not have that network and it contributed to my meltdown.
6. Neglecting My Relationship with God
During the year that led to my meltdown, I did not lose my faith, nor did I stop believing in God. I did not walk away from Christ or stop being a Christian. However, I did neglect the cultivation of my relationship with God. I stopped journaling, praying, and reading Scripture. I traded in my quiet time so I could get more things done. I swapped praying for reading and reviewing documents and books for school and work. I put the journal away and wrote papers, proposals, and newsletters instead. I ended up being spiritually dry. My devotional system (or lack thereof) was perfectly designed for the results I was getting. No time with God = no spiritual life.
What are the warning signs you’ve learned to look for in your life? How do you prevent yourself from melting down? Share your thoughts. Enrich the discussion.
I’m tired of happy Christians. I am not saying that want them to be unhappy; only that I think it is time for Christians to start being real with each other and the world around them.
Over the course of my Christian experience I have bumped into people who, as followers of Christ, have lost the ability to stay in touch with real emotions. They walk through life with a smile, a prayer, and a few memory verses they can quote to negate any bad feeling they or another person might have. At the top of their arsenal of Scripture verses are “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” This is the emotional trump card.
Your closest loved one just died in a tragic automobile accident…All things work together for good for those that love the Lord!
You are experiencing a dark period in your life as you battle depression…All things work together for good!
You were just diagnosed with cancer…All things work together for good!
Your business is failing…You guessed it…All things work together for good!
To be sure, I believe that God has good purposes for those who are committed to them and if we stay open to him in those circumstances we can discover those purposes and learn lessons that help us mature. In question here is not the truth of Scripture or the validity of this theological proposition. Rather, I am disappointed with how this verse is used to sweep hurtful circumstances and painful experiences under the rug as if they are not real and do not matter.
Life is hard. Emotions are real. And things that we experience in life bring hurt and pain. It is not unChristian to feel bad when bad things happen to us. It is human.
And guess what? Christians are human.
Mature Christians have emotional integrity. They feel what they are experiencing and they honor the feelings of others by entering into that feeling with them. Instead of covering over it with a smile and a verse they decide to “weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice” (Rom. 12:15).
So how do we cultivate emotional integrity? Let me suggest a few ways I am attempting to grow my emotional integrity.
1. Slow down and pay attention.
Life moves quickly and we are busy people. We move too fast to feel. We don’t take the time to reflect and we do not allow ourselves the space to explore our feelings. One thing I am doing to re-awaken my emotional awareness is a practice I picked up from Julie Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way
I began the practice with much skepticism and the first few days it did not do too much for me. However, I stuck with it and after the first week my writing began to explore deeper issues. I found that I was stepping back to view situations and circumstances from a different perspective. And then something wonderful and dreadful happened. I became aware of my feelings. This is a healthy thing, but it is also scary, especially when I had for so long been too busy to feel anything. Clearly, this writing practice does not magically make a person emotional mature, but it does help a person slow down every day to pay attention to what is happening and how it feels. This is where the journey to emotional integrity begins.
2. Listen to yourself and others.
You cannot feel what you are experiencing or honor the feelings of others if you do tune into those emotions. This requires you to listen. Listen to the internal conversation you are having with yourself as you walk through various situations in your day. What are you telling yourself? How are physically responding to the situation? Is your heart rate increasing? Are you tensing up? Is your blood boiling? Are you feeling sad or afraid or distressed? Listen to yourself and what you are feeling.
As you begin to slow down and listen to yourself you will begin to cultivate the ability to listen to others around you. Listen for the emotions that are running behind the words they are saying. As you respond to them, don’t just respond to the words; connect with the emotions they are expressing.
When a person vents to you about how busy they have been and how they are running from one thing to another and wondering if they are going to get it all done. You can respond by saying, “Slow down, relax, make a list, and do one thing at a time. You’ll get it done.” This may be good advice. But if you want to connect with them at an emotional level, you can identify the feelings you’ve heard them express. ”This is a stressful time for you. It sounds like you are carrying a heavy load during this season. How can I be helpful to you?”
The first response offers sound advice that may be helpful. The second response makes a connection and allows the other person to know that you have heard them. The first response keeps you as the advice giver separate from the other person; you remain outside their situation as a teacher. The second response places you next to them in the circumstance; you enter into their situation as a servant. People with emotional integrity hear the other person, enter into their situation, identify with what they are feeling, and take on the posture of a servant ready to help.
3. Sit with the questions.
Some of the most raw emotions I have experienced in my own life or when dealing with others have come as I have confronted hard questions about life, tragedy, failure, pain, and loss. Where is God? Why did this happen? If God is good, how could he allow this to occur? The temptation for the happy Christian is to avoid these tough questions with one of those syrupy smiles and a rote response from Scripture. As I have asked my questions, I have been on the receiving end of some of these ill-timed happy responses. Instead of feeling loved and cared for I have felt belittled, minimized, and overlooked. Fortunately, I have had some key individuals who have had the ability to sit with my questions. They didn’t try to answer them or even respond to them. They just acknowledged that I was raising a tough question and that they did not have an answer for me. This allowed me to face those questions instead of feeling guilty for asking them. Learning to sit with questions that you and others have is a mark of emotional integrity.
What thoughts do you have on the concept of emotional integrity? I’d love to hear your insights, questions, and practical ideas for how to cultivate this aspect of our character. Leave a comment below and enrich the conversation.
