Gospel.com Blog

Burnout—if you’ve not experienced it, chances are you’ve skirted its edges once or twice. It’s a phenomenon alarmingly common in ministry professions (although it’s certainly not restricted to them); visit online forums frequented by pastors or your ministers and you’ll bump into regular requests for help with burnout, despair, and frustration.

So how to cope with burnout when you feel it crouching at your door? Legacy Youth Ministry Resources has a good article about detecting and coping with burnout. Here are their suggestions for someone feeling overwhelmed:

1. Take a break and get some rest. Understand your physical limitations and accept them. God probably has much less expectations of you than you have of yourself.
2. Change the habits in your life that are unhealthy – whether eating, sleeping, exercise, etc.
3. Write out a clear statement of your specific calling in ministry. Share this with a close friend. Make a commitment to not accept any offers that do not fit clearly into this calling and ask this friend to help you make decisions accordingly.
4. Make a list of everything you do in a week. Draw a line through anything that doesn’t help you accomplish God’s calling in your life. Next, underline the things that you do that could be done by someone else. Write the name of that person next to this thing. Delegate! What are left with should be the things that ONLY you can do. If these things are really God?s will, you have enough time to accomplish them without burning out. If not, you still need to draw some lines through more things.
5. Designate one day a month for solitude. Find a place with no distractions (including your mobile phone) and spend the most part of one day there.
6. Make a list of all the people that you spend time with on a regular basis. Next to each name, determine if they are drainers, average, teachable or fillers. If you find that you are not spending most of your times with the latter two, make the necessary changes.
7. Review your vision statement and the goals that you have set to accomplish this. If you have not yet written these things on a piece of paper, do this during your day of solitude at the monastery.

Read the full article at Legacy Youth Ministry Resources.

Those are easier said than done; of course. For further help with burnout, see also Say No to Burnout by Elizabeth Skoglund of the Psychology for Living ministry.

Have you lived through the nightmare of personal or professional burnout? How did you make it through, and what would you say to somebody who feels burnout coming on?

What do you think?

Has God ever turned a “worthless” job or event in your life into something amazing?

In an article at Student Leadership Journal, Alex Kirk describes a phenomenon he calls “tent duty,” based on a story in the book of Exodus: when God puts you in a seemingly boring or pointless situation, only to later reveal that He had a definite purpose in mind for placing you there. God might redeem that “wasted” time in a spectacular, obvious way or He might never make it clear why He put you there; but regardless, Christians should learn to appreciate the experience of being on dull, boring “tent duty” from time to time.

Kirk cites an amazing example of tent duty in action in the life of his grandfather, a missionary to Brazil. One summer, disillusioned by his failure to get into a missionary program, he took a seemingly pointless job at a cigarette-making plant and chalked up the entire summer as a complete waste. But years later, in Brazil, God suddenly revealed the purpose behind that wasted summer in the cigarette factory:

Several years into their ministry, a government came into power that was skeptical of foreign missionaries. It cracked down on their operations, restricting them from access to the paper needed to produce Bibles in Portuguese. My grandfather’s experience at the cigarette plant provided this invaluable insight: cigarette paper was the same weight as the paper they were running through their press. The printing presses that the government had tried to shut down were cranked back up and they produced hundreds of Bibles on cigarette paper. As the Bibles were distributed throughout the country, a seemingly wasted summer was wasted no more.

We’ve all found ourselves on “tent duty” at some point. Maybe for you, it was a boring stint behind a keyboard in a cubicle farm, far from your dreams of an exciting career. Or maybe you settled into a low-paying, unglamorous job after your post-graduation hopes fell through. Something that made you think “Surely God could be using me more effectively somewhere else.”

Looking back at that experience, do you see any hints of God’s plan? Did you learn or experience something that redeemed that “wasted” time? Or do you struggle to see a purpose behind it? If you’ve ever been stuck on tent duty, share your experiences below!

Are you struggling to find work in this economic climate? Or maybe you’ve managed to stay employed, but are feeling the pinch of a tighter budget or mounting debt. As the ongoing economic crisis continues to drag on, chances are that you and the people you love have been directly affected by it.

Biblica has put together a series of articles and helpful resources for anyone coping with unemployment and other economic pressures. They note that the loss of a job and economic security is more than just a financial setback: it exacts a spiritual and emotional toll as well. Biblica’s articles address issues like fear, anxiety, faith, and hope—all things that you experience during the turbulence of unemployment.

So if you’re desperate for a ray of hope in the midst of a personal financial crisis, take a look at Biblica’s unemployment resources. They might help you find the perspective you need to make it through.

Sometimes, it’s easy to convince ourselves that quitting is the best option. Would it really be that bad if we were to break our diet? Would it be terrible to give up on a rocky relationship? Would it really hurt anybody if we just stopped reading the Bible?

In our best moments, I think we all know quitting difficult things just because they are difficult is never the best option. Yet, there’s often a very loud voice in our head screaming a panoply of reasons why we should reconsider those commitments.

Michael Hyatt—the CEO of Thomas Nelson, Inc.—articulates how he counteracts these thoughts in his post, What Keeps You Going When You Want to Quit. It really has me thinking about why I don’t give up on certain things, and why I have—possibly foolishly—quit others.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

What these same voices fail to tell you is that there is a distinction between the dream and the work required to obtain it. Everything important requires work. Hard work. And sometimes there is a long arc between the dream and it’s realization. That is where the work and the transformation occur.

In my experience, the thing that keeps me going is answering this question, “Why am I doing this?” I then try to remember the dream. “Why I am doing this hard thing that I am doing.” I try to get connected to the original vision, because that keeps me going when the going gets tough.

There are a few verses in the second chapter of Job that have stuck with me ever since I first read them. Job has just lost everything he owns and is covered in sores. Sitting destitute in the street, his wife comes to him and tells him to curse God and die. He amazingly responds, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?”

Job’s wife has given up on the situation, and if we were honest, many of us would as well. We’d start to reconsider our commitment to a God that would allow such heartache. Yet, Job examines the situation and concludes that it’s not for him to judge his commitment to God based on his present circumstances. As Mr. Hyatt would say, he stayed “connected to the original vision.”

What about you? What keeps you going when times get hard?

Christians talk a lot about “shaping culture” and “having an impact on society.” What springs to mind when you hear those phrases? I tend to think of Christians trying to spread evangelistic or moral messages through entertainment or politics. Those are certainly major places where Christians can live out their values—but there’s a more mundane, perhaps even more important, place where we are called to live out our faith: the business world.

From the Enron scandal a decade ago to the recent economic crisis, it’s clear that Christlike values are as needed in the business community as they are in any other aspect of life. At the Lausanne World Pulse site, John Terrill addresses this in A Revolution of Vocation, which argues that the church should do a better job of equipping and supporting Christians who are called into business:

We desperately need to recover the sacredness of a calling to business. The Church must continue to renounce the sacred/secular divide that has beleaguered Christian communities for too long. As A.W. Tozer rightly notes in The Pursuit of God, far too many Christians get snared in this trap: “They cannot get a satisfactory adjustment between the claims of the two worlds…. Their strength is reduced, their outlook confused and their joy taken from them.” And I might add that their impact in the world is severely constrained.

Christ followers serving in business, law, healthcare, the arts, media, government, and every other profession need to experience in tangible ways the Church’s blessing of their Christ-honoring work in companies, law firms, clinics, studios, press rooms, and congressional chambers.

Terrill thinks the church has much to say about the role of business within a community, and that in today’s globally interconnected economy, business is a means of doing Christ’s work in the world.

It’s a challenging and helpful read, especially if you or someone you know is a professional trying to figure out how their profession relates to their Christian faith. Terrill’s is a fairly high-level approach; for more ground-level articles about living out your faith in your day-to-day job, see this collection of essays about Christianity in the workplace from Discipleship Tools.

How about you? Do you feel your church supports you in your career? Do you feel called to your profession? Do you have a sense of how your job fits into the big picture of your Christian life?

The anxiety of losing a job can be crippling. One feels as if the life they have cultivated over the years just collapsed, and even in good economic times job searches take time. One’s purpose in life seems fleeting as the days of unemployment start to count up.

It is often while waiting for interviews or during the days of trawling the classifieds that even the ardently optimistic succumb to hopelessness. The weight of it all just becomes overwhelming.

Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Here’s a brief excerpt from a helpful article by Christian Career Center titled Finding Hope in Troubled Times:

While there are key tactics that can help people find jobs more quickly, one of the most important strategies is cultivating a sense of hopefulness. Hope is critical to a successful job search. Without hope, we lose momentum and stop taking action to move forward. With hope, however, we are motivated to keep going. Hope enables us to believe that things will get better and that we will be able to overcome the present difficulties.

The source of hope for Christians, of course, is not a new President or new economic strategies, but, rather, God. And yet, while we may profess to believe in a God who knows us by name, cares about our lives, and has the power to see us through whatever difficulties we encounter, we may still find ourselves wrestling with despair and discouragement. How about you? If you could use more hope in your life and job search, try out these suggestions…

Head over to Christian Career Center to finish the article.

Our featured topic this week has been vocation. It’s a word that carries a lot of different meanings and connotations: job, career, calling. For Christians in particular, however, the word refers to something bigger than just holding down a 9-to-5 job or landing a promotion at the office. When we speak of pursuing a vocation, we’re talking not just about day-to-day jobs, but about a lifetime of good works and faithfulness to God.

But obviously, your career is a huge part of your vocation—it’s where you spend much of your time. So what careers should a Christian pursue? Are some career “callings”—such as missionary work of pastoral service—more “Christian” than others? While we might have stereotypes of ministry work as being holier than other jobs, the Bible doesn’t quite make that distinction. In fact, the Bible never lists out what jobs and careers Christians should follow; it merely states that “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”

Finding your vocation, then, is as much about serving God in your everyday life as it is about finding just the right career. Here are a few resources from the Gospel.com community that can help you think through this:

• Into Thy Word has a good, short introduction to the idea of spiritual gifts—special talents that God has blessed each of us with individually.
• Many Christians try to identify their spiritual talents and then use that knowledge to help them find the place in work, school, and church where they’re best able to serve. The Church Growth Institute has an online test you can take to identify your spiritual gifts.
• The Christian Career Center has many good resources to help you find a vocation that fits your gifts and interests. See their career guidance articles, particularly Making Career Decisions within God’s Will for Your Life and Discovering Your Unique, God-Given Design.
• …and plenty other links to job openings, career counseling, and more at the Jobs page.

Take a look through these resources and see what you can learn about your vocation—what you’re doing now, where you want to be, and how you can serve God with all your heart no matter where He’s placed you.