I have a bunion, a deformity related to the bone structure of my foot. Most people have big toes that stick out straight or slant gently in toward the other toes. The big toe on my left foot (the right one has been surgically corrected) juts in at an unacceptable forty-degree angle, jamming the smaller toes together. As tendons shrink further, the toe will wrap itself across the top of its neighbor and will be subjected to the surgeon’s knife as well.
My angled toe has developed an ungainly bump on the side of the foot: my bunion. It rarely causes pain, but it does complicate shoe-buying. Shoe manufacturers, I have learned, do not tend to make shoes with large, ungainly bumps on the side. As a result, I must buy shoes too large for my right (surgically corrected) foot, and trust the bunion to impose its own shape on the left shoe. It usually does, at a price.
Since for nearly twenty years I’ve been a jogger, I have learned the sequence of my body’s adaptation to shoes all too well. As I run, my left big toe, angling away from the shoe cushion, decides to create its own support to fill in the gap.
First I get a blister, a temporary, liquid-filled pad that doesn’t lend itself to running. When I stubbornly persist, the foot turns to a more permanent supporting structure comprised of thick layers of hardened callus. Over time, the callus fills the gap in the shoe, and I run in comfort-for a while.
But eventually the callus grows so large that it starts to create friction of its own, and painful blood blisters develop under the callus. I pull out a manicure kit, clip the callus down until I reach layers of tender, pink skin underneath, and the process begins to re-cycle.
For those of you with normal feet, all this may make for tedious reading. Believe me, it makes for tedious foot care. I used to resent my bunion, harboring deep hostility toward the developing callus and the tenderness that followed. Then one day Dr. Paul Brand, my co-author on three books on the human body, softened my attitude.
“I once had a similar problem,” he told me. “One year in medical school I spent the summer sailing on a schooner on the North Sea. The first week, as I pulled on heavy ropes to hoist the sail, my fingertips became so sore that they bled and kept me awake at night with the pain. By the end of the second week calluses were forming, and soon afterwards thick calluses covered my fingers. I had no more trouble with tenderness that summer-the calluses protected me.
“But when I returned to medical school two months later, I found to my chagrin that I had lost my finer skills in dissection. The calluses made my fingers less sensitive and I could scarcely feel the instruments. For a few weeks I worried that I had ruined my career as a surgeon. Gradually, though, with my sedentary life, the calluses disappeared, and sensitivity returned. Each time, my body was loyally finding ways to adapt to the changing needs I imposed on it.”
I began to see that my body is struggling constantly to find the proper balance between hypersensitivity and callus. Like Dr. Brand’s fingers, my foot loses sensitivity to pain and pressure when it builds up the calluses. But after a while, my body determines that it dare not make my foot too callused. To persuade me to stop abusing my foot, my body creates blood blisters, which make me hypersensitive to pain and force me to adjust my behavior.
Ever since, I have tried to view my body’s efforts with gratitude, not resentment. I cannot say that I enjoy the routine of blister/callus/blood blister/manicure. But I grasp the reason for it now.
My conversation with Dr. Brand did something else as well: it gave me a useful metaphor for thinking about ministry in the body of Christ. People on the front lines of ministry, the “skin” on the body, expose themselves to changing stresses.
Sometimes a person in ministry needs the fine skill of a surgeon. The repair of human souls often requires more sensitivity than the repair of human bodies. Other times the person in ministry, overburdened, short of resources, besieged by unsolvable problems, needs a layer of callus. Indeed, at times ministry resembles what a sailor endures as he clings to the lines of the mainsail in a raging storm.
Christian ministry, like my foot, like Dr. Brand’s fingertips, dangles on a pendulum between hypersensitivity and callus.
For eleven years my wife served in an urban ministry to the elderly in Chicago. At close range I watched her and the dedicated people who ran other ministries associated with LaSalle Street Church: a youth work, a program for single mothers, a tutoring program, a legal aid clinic, a counseling center, an outreach to international students.
Some workers remained so hypersensitive to the pain around them that they succumbed to that pain. (“Burnout” they called it; I saw it as a failure to develop protective callus.) Others developed a callousness that made ministry seem like just another job-a low-paying job with few rewards. Neither group lasted long in ministry.
I came away impressed by the precarious but necessary balance between hypersensitivity and callus.
The Need to Eat Tears
“My idea was pretty simple at the beginning. I started to volunteer in wards with terminally ill children or burn victims-just go in there to cheer them up a little, spread around some giggles. Gradually, it developed that I was going to come in as a clown. …
“[Things] were very tough for me at the beginning-very. You see some pretty terrible things in these wards. Seeing children dying or mutilated is nothing most of us ever get prepared for. Nobody teaches us to face suffering in this society. We never talk about it until we get hit in the face. …
“Some of us were setting up to show Godzilla in the kids’ leukemia ward. I was making up kids as clowns. One kid was totally bald from chemotherapy, and when I finished doing his face, another kid said, ‘Go on and do the rest of his head.’ The kid loved the idea. And when I was done, his sister said, ‘Hey, we can show the movie on Billy’s head.’ And he really loved that idea. So we set up Godzilla and ran it on Billy’s head, and Billy was pleased as punch, and we were all mighty proud of Billy. It was quite a moment. Especially when the doctors arrived. …
“Burnt skin or bald heads on little kids-what do you do? I guess you just face it-when the kids are really hurting so bad, and so afraid, and probably dying, and everybody’s heart is breaking. You face it and see what happens after that; you see what to do next.
“I got the idea of traveling with popcorn. When a kid is crying I dab up the tears with the popcorn and pop it into my mouth or into his or hers. We sit around together and eat the tears.” (From How Can I Help? by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman [Knopf, 1985])
In ministry hypersensitivity means, quite simply, feeling another person’s pain. It means eating another person’s tears.
We recently moved away from Chicago, and my wife is no longer involved in urban ministry. But I have clear memories of sitting at the table in our apartment, eating tears.
Janet would tell me about George, in a Cook County Hospital ward being treated for gangrene from frostbite, or about Margaret, who was going blind and had just been mugged. Janet felt helpless before giant social problems like homelessness, violent crime, and inadequate health care. She did everything she could during the day, but sometimes, in the evening, all she could do was cry.
Does it do any good, this eating of tears? Does it help for a person to be hypersensitive, to deliberately risk exposure to another person’s pain? Yes, I believe that it does. I believe it helps when a man puts on a red rubber nose, dresses in a green and yellow suit, and slips into oversized shoes to bring joy and laughter to a kids’ leukemia ward. It helps when that man stays to eat tear-laced popcorn. And it mattered a great deal to George and to Margaret to know that one person-maybe only one person-bore their pain and carried it home with her.
Several times, especially after one of the senior citizens had died, Janet said something like this: “I should resign. I’m no good at this job. Look at me, sitting here bawling over one of my ‘clients.’ It’s not professional. I can’t handle the pain.”
And I would reply, “Janet, you are the only person in the world right now who is shedding a tear because Paul died. Do you really think those senior citizens would be better served by someone who did not cry?”
Henri Nouwen’s The Wounded Healer describes lonely, abandoned people who have no one to love them. Nouwen tells of a young minister who has nothing to offer an old man facing surgery except his own loving concern. “No man can stay alive when nobody is waiting for him,” writes Nouwen. “Everyone who returns from a long and difficult trip is looking for someone waiting for him at the station or the airport. Everyone wants to tell his story and share his moments of pain and exhilaration with someone who stayed home, waiting for him to come back.”
Sometimes the only meaning those of us in ministry can offer suffering people is the assurance that their suffering, which has no apparent meaning for them, has meaning for us.
At times, though, despite our best efforts to honor others’ pain, we encounter suffering that appears utterly devoid of meaning. At those times, eating tears may seem useless. I am thinking of a man with Alzheimer’s disease; his daughter tries to attend to his needs, but every day her heart is broken by the sad shell of what used to be her father.
I think of a severely disabled child with an IQ in the 30-40 range. The child may live a long life lying motionless in a crib, unable to talk, unable to comprehend, soaking up expensive professional care.
Where is the meaning in such a senile adult and in such a child? What is the purpose of sharing their tears? I received help on this question from a doctor in Eastern Germany. For many years the church, restricted in their activities by the Communist Party, adopted the least “valuable” or “useful” members of society.
“What is the point of their lives? Do their lives have any meaning?” asked Dr. Jurgen Trogisch, a pediatrician who devoted himself to severely mentally handicapped children.
For a long time Dr. Trogisch could not answer the question of meaning. He performed his medical tasks anyway, but he had no answer. Then he conducted an introductory course to train new helpers for the center. At the end of the one-year training period, he asked the young helpers to fill out a survey. Among the questions was this one, “What changes have taken place in your life since you became totally involved with disabled people?” Here is a selection of their answers:
For the first time in my life I feel I am doing something really significant.
I feel I can now do things I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of before.
During my time here I have won the affection of Sabine. Having had the opportunity to involve myself with a disabled person, I no longer think of her as disabled at all.
I am more responsive now to human suffering, and it arouses in me the desire to help.
It’s made me question what is really important in life.
Work has assumed a new meaning and purpose. I feel I’m needed now.
I’ve learned to be patient and to appreciate even the slightest sign of progress.
In observing the disabled, I’ve discovered myself.
I’ve become more tolerant. My own little problems don’t seem so important any longer, and I’ve learned to accept myself with all my inadequacies. Above all I’ve learned to appreciate the little pleasures of life, and especially I thank God that he has shown me that love can achieve more than hate or force.
As Dr. Trogisch read their responses, he realized with a start the answer to his question. The meaning of the suffering of those children was being worked out in the lives of others, his helpers, who were learning lessons that no sophisticated educational system could teach.
Trogisch thought of two patients he had worked with for years, in whom he had seen little progress. “Could it be that Daniel and Monika have come into this world just for me? Are their deep and insistent questions perhaps God’s questions to me? Are these two severely disabled children an answer-God’s answer to me?”
Dr. Trogisch has put his finger on one aspect of ministry that often gets overlooked. We tend to focus on the objects of ministry: the souls led to Christ, the marriages rescued, the poor fed and housed, the homebound elderly visited, the teenagers challenged. But Jesus seems equally interested in what ministry is doing to the ministers themselves.
When seventy-two disciples came back with exciting reports of results, Jesus celebrated with them for a moment and then said, “However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). Evidently, what was going on inside the disciples was as important to Jesus as anything they had accomplished on the outside.
Eating tears benefits the one who voluntarily takes them on as well as the one who sheds them in the first place.
As I have watched people in ministry, I have seen the salutary effect of shared tears. With some exceptions, I have noticed, peculiar people go into ministry. By and large, athletes, cheerleaders, and brilliant students do not choose ministry. In a day when more than half of all college students major in business or other practical degrees, what would motivate someone to choose a career in one of the helping professions?
Paul’s formula, “Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth” (1 Cor. 1:26), still holds true.
I am generalizing, of course, but I have noticed that many of my friends in urban ministry battle problems of self-esteem. They have to undergo the humiliating procedure of begging people for money to support their work. They report to offices in rundown buildings outfitted with hand-me-down furniture. They serve clients who express thanks by coming back and asking for more. All this does little for self-esteem.
These people have one quality, though, that stands out: a hypersensitivity to pain. Whereas the rest of us turn our faces from the homeless, shake our heads at the tragedy, and get on with our lives, these few say, “No, we can’t turn away from this pain. Homeless people bear God’s image, too. We must serve them, as Jesus would-as if they were Jesus.”
I know the typical response to the urban scenario I have just described: Develop a professional distance from society’s pain. Make social work a respectable occupation.
This advice makes good sense to me, and I would endorse it wholeheartedly except for one fact: frankly, I do not see that as Jesus’ model. His disciples proposed something similar-Hey, let’s elect officers, establish a hierarchy, set some standards of professionalism-Jesus quietly picked up a towel and basin of water and began to wash their feet. “I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you,” he said (John 13:15).
Later, Paul said, “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who … made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant” (Phil. 2:5-7). The biblical pattern for ministry is not to remove the shame and personality quirks, but rather to redeem such problems by recognizing that the way to strength is through weakness.
The apostle Paul (one of the few wise and influential ones chosen) pled three times for his “thorn in the flesh” to be removed, and we can only speculate on the content of those prayers. Lord, think how much more effective I would be if you removed this thorn. It’s holding me back in my ministry. It’s inhibiting your work. I could accomplish great things if you healed this problem. The answer to the apostle’s prayers was a firm no.
Why did God allow his suffering to continue? Paul himself gives the blunt reason: “To keep me from becoming conceited.” God said to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:7-9).
I have been to AA groups and have heard wrenching stories of what it takes for a person to learn to confront his or her own brokenness, to “reach the end of myself,” as they often put it. Alcoholics tell of an excruciating process that must play itself out before they can admit they are weak, not strong, and must permanently depend on a Higher Power as a source of outside strength. There is an easier way to learn these lessons, I have found: in ministry.
We need to be not just “wounded healers,” but “wounded healers who have been healed.” God’s definition of a healed person, though, is unlike most of ours. Those who minister have an opportunity to learn compassion (the very word means “to suffer with”), humility, patience-qualities that would never even make the agenda at most Fortune 500 firms.
I have seen in my own wife the advantages of working in ministry. She too went to a poorly furnished office each day and spent her time among people who rarely said, “Thank you.” She too had to raise her own salary, a procedure that replayed her missionary kid’s shame. But I can truthfully say that her willingness to expose herself to others’ pain ended up nourishing her as much as them. With all the objectivity a husband can muster, I see her now as a stronger, more beautiful person. She received few rewards for her work, as the world measures them. The rewards worked themselves out inside her.
Still, we dare not discount the rewards that God grants. They come sometimes through shame and humiliation (Philippians 2 hints that they come only through shame and humiliation). But they are precious to God, more valuable than any amount of money and prestige one can accumulate in other professions. We find our lives by losing them. And we lose them best in service to others.
Hypersensitivity to pain can be a resource, an unexpected gift. The same tears that break our hearts may also nourish us in ways that matter most to God.
The Need for Calluses
One year I decided to run the Chicago Marathon. I was already running 20-25 miles a week, but my running magazines informed me I would need to double that. In typical straight-ahead fashion, I doubled my mileage immediately and amazingly my body handled the extra rigor well. My lungs held up, my heart met the challenge, and my muscles, though sore, soon adapted.
But not my bunion. After a few weeks of the new regimen, the skin around my big toe became so hypersensitive I could hardly walk a block, much less run ten miles. I had to cut back on exercise until gradually, painstakingly, new layers of callus built up to cope with the added stress.
Something similar happens to people in ministry. Compassionate people who are adept at serving others can suddenly enter a whole new level of stress-a friend comes down with AIDS, a spouse files for divorce, the church rumor mill shifts into high gear-and find themselves unprotected.
Hypersensitivity, once their greatest strength, now becomes an enemy. The skin tissue on my foot responded by breaking down, practically crippling me until I produced more callus. The same thing happens to ministers. The pain that once nourished suddenly imperils. If you eat too many tears, you get salt poisoning.
How can we avoid poisoning? How do we gauge the need for more protective layers of callus?
Preventing Tissue Breakdown
I confess that I am no expert. A Type A personality by nature, I lack good judgment on symptoms of burnout in myself and must rely on the counsel of my wife and a few trusted friends.
Being married to a person on the front lines of ministry, however, I did learn a few principles that may help others detect early symptoms of tissue breakdown-a kind of checklist of danger signs.
1. Are you more concerned about a person’s pain than the person? I once heard someone describe a nurse as, “Typhoid Mary-disguised as Florence Nightingale,” explaining, “She has a nonstop ‘gotta help’ complex. She’s obsessed about relieving other people’s pain because of the discomfort she feels about pain. As a result, she spreads around as much distress as healing.”
I have learned to recognize one early warning symptom of burnout: a feeling of overwhelming personal responsibility, as though the fate of a church, a community, a nation-yea, even the entire universe-rests on the shoulders of one dedicated minister. Ministering to people in need sometimes calls for a sense of detachment, an appropriate callus that cushions the helper from the pain of the one who needs help.
Frederick Buechner, author and ordained minister, describes the syndrome in Telling Secrets:
“Love your neighbor as yourself is part of the great commandment. The other way to say it is, Love yourself as your neighbor. Love yourself not in some egocentric, self-serving sense but love yourself the way you would love your friend in the sense of taking care of yourself, nourishing yourself, trying to understand, comfort, strengthen yourself. Ministers in particular, people in the caring professions in general, are famous for neglecting their selves with the result that they are apt to become in their own way as helpless and crippled as the people they are trying to care for and thus no longer selves who can be of much use to anybody. If your daughter is struggling for life in a raging torrent, you do not save her by jumping into the torrent with her, which leads only to your both drowning together. Instead you keep your feet on the dry bank-you maintain as best you can your own inner peace, the best and strongest of who you are-and from that solid ground reach out a rescuing hand. … A bleeding heart is of no help to anybody if it bleeds to death.”
Then Buechner, who has been writing autobiographically about his daughter who was in fact struggling for life, adds this sentence, “How easy it was to write such words and how impossible it was to live them.”
His family’s only salvation was that his daughter sought treatment for her anorexia some three thousand miles from home. He was not there to protect her and manipulate events on her behalf. The people who were there-the doctors, nurses, social workers, and even a judge who hospitalized her against her will-had a kind of callus that Buechner the father did not have, could not have.
“Those men and women were not haggard, dithering, lovesick as I was. They were realistic, tough, conscientious, and in those ways, though they would never have put it in such terms themselves, loved her in a sense that I believe is closer to what Jesus meant by love than what I had been doing.”
The syndrome of unhealthy self-sacrifice for the sake of others, of bearing more of a person’s pain than the person herself, is sometimes called a “savior complex.” Yet the true Savior seemed remarkably free of such a complex. He caught a boat to escape crowds; he insisted on privacy and time alone; he accepted a “wasteful” gift of perfume that, as Judas pointed out, could have been sold and used to alleviate human misery. Jesus healed everyone who asked him, but not everyone he met.
He had the amazing, and rare, capacity to let people choose their own pain. He exposed Judas but did not try to prevent his evil deed; he denounced the Pharisees without trying to coerce them into his point of view; he answered a wealthy man’s question with uncompromising words, and let him walk away. Mark pointedly adds this comment about the wealthy man, “Jesus looked at him and loved him.”
In short, Jesus showed an incredible respect for human freedom. He had no compulsion to convert the entire world in his lifetime or to cure people who were not ready to be cured. Those of us in ministry need the kind of “savior complex” that Jesus demonstrated. Hypersensitivity to pain can be a gift, yes. But like many gifts, if allowed to control and dominate, it can destroy. I get worried when I see ministers looking more pained and needy than the people they serve.
2. Do you have people around you who value what you do? Recently I spent some time at a support facility for the Wycliffe Bible Translators in the desert near Tucson, Arizona. Early one morning while jogging two miles down the road, I came across a nationally known eating disorder center, an exclusive clinic frequented by movie stars and athletes. At first I thought I had stumbled on a five-star resort. It had swimming pools, jogging paths, basketball and tennis courts, horse trails, and shady picnic grounds. The modern stucco buildings gleamed in the sunlight.
I could not help comparing those facilities to the Wycliffe headquarters. Their office buildings, square and functional, were mostly made of concrete block and had little architectural embellishment. Many of the staff members lived in mobile homes scattered among the hills. It struck me that the contrast between the two facilities illustrated an inescapable fact of ministry: the world values the material more than the spiritual. In order to lose a few fat cells, people will pay thousands of dollars and insist on first-class treatment. Meanwhile, those who feel called to Jesus’ far more difficult campaign of rooting out things like pride, greed, lust, violence, envy, and injustice must struggle to survive.
Fortunately, as I found out over the next few days, the Wycliffe personnel had high morale. The reason, I believe, is that they formed for each other a community of mutual support. The world may value the cure of eating disorders more than the cure of souls, but not these missionaries. They prayed together, worshiped together, and honored each other for the noble calling they held in common.
Many pastors lack such a community. As one pastor told me, “I get the feeling that nobody values me. The church budget committee is always looking for ways to cut expenses, and my ‘perks’ seem an easy target. Honor my work? This congregation specializes in criticizing it.”
People in ministry can counteract such feelings with the help of a support group that functions as a community. You can see the difference a community makes by comparing two novels, Catch-22 and MASH. In Joseph Heller’s war novel, a paranoid-schizophrenic airman concludes the world is against him and edges toward absurdist despair. The characters who populate the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, however, face many of the same problems. But somehow, in the hills of Korea, a wacky but mutually supportive community has taken shape. When choppers full of wounded descend, the doctors and nurses grimace, crack a few jokes, then pick up the tools and get to work. Learning to turn a Catch-22 setting into MASH may be critical to surviving in ministry.
My wife ministered among some of the poorest people in Chicago, and the suffering and injustice she encountered each day were nearly overwhelming. I soon found that it was up to me to detect when Janet needed a weekend away, or a dinner out, or a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert.
She felt guilty indulging in such luxuries-none of the senior citizens she worked with could afford them-but I knew that a steady diet of pain would render her incapable of helping anyone. As part of her support community, I had to help provide for her the inner nourishment that gave her strength to continue on the front lines.
3. Are you confusing God with life? Douglas had lived the most Job-like existence of anyone I knew. Just when he made a sacrificial decision to enter urban ministry, his world unraveled. Funding for his ministry fell through, his wife got cancer, and a drunk driver hit his car, badly injuring Douglas and his 12-year-old daughter. I expected Douglas to describe his disappointment with God, but to my surprise he said he had not had such feelings.
“I learned a long time ago, and especially through these tragedies, not to confuse God with life,” Douglas told me. “I’m no stoic. I am as upset about what happened to me as anyone could be. I feel free to curse the unfairness of life and to vent all my grief and anger. But I believe God feels the same way as I do about that accident-grieved and angry. I don’t blame him for what has happened.”
Douglas continued, “I have learned to see beyond the physical reality in this world to the spiritual reality. We tend to think, Life should be fair because God is fair. But God is not life. If we develop a relationship with God apart from our life circumstances, then we may be able to hang on when the physical reality breaks down. We can learn to trust God despite all the unfairness of life.”
Most biblical heroes went through trials much like Job’s (or Douglas’s). For each of them, at times, the physical reality surely seemed to present God as the enemy. But each managed to trust God despite the hardships. Their faith moved from a “contract faith”-I’ll follow God if he treats me well-to a relationship that could transcend any hardship.
I have observed that people in ministry, perhaps more so than most people, live with an unstated “contract faith.” After all, they’re giving up prestige and glory, and often a good salary, to work for God; don’t they deserve special treatment in return?
My wife was irritated when she would get a parking ticket while stopping to pick up meat for a soup kitchen or while visiting a shut-in at the hospital. The meter expired for the very reason that she sensed a need to devote more time to doing God’s work. Her reward: a $25 fine and a half-day trip to the city courthouse!
Bud, one of the true “saints” in urban ministry in Chicago, nearly cut his hand off on a power saw while demonstrating to volunteers how to build houses for the homeless. What theology could possibly explain such a turn of events?
The apostle Paul learned to see past the hardships of life to a loving God who will one day prevail. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39). Confidence like that can go a long way towards solving discouragement over a ministry that never quite works out the way we wish.
4. Whom are you working for? If you instinctively answer a church, a board, an executive committee, or even your clients, then you are in danger. Ministry is a “calling,” and the only effective minister is one who reports to the One who did the calling.
I have been to Calcutta, India, a place of poverty, death, and irremediable human problems. There, Mother Teresa and her nuns serve perhaps the poorest, most miserable people on the planet. The nuns find them lying half-dead, emaciated bodies on the streets of Calcutta. The world stands in awe at their dedication and the results of their ministry, but something about the nuns impresses me even more-their serenity. If I tackled such a mammoth, hopeless project, I would likely be scurrying about, sending press releases, begging for more resources, gulping tranquilizers, searching for ways to cope with my mounting despair. Not these nuns.
Their serenity traces back to what takes place before their day’s work begins. At 4 A.M., long before the sun, the sisters rise. They dress in spotless white habits and go to the chapel, where they pray and sing together. Before they ever meet their first “client,” they have immersed themselves in worship and in the love of God.
I sense no panic in the sisters who run the Home for the Dying in Calcutta. I see concern and compassion, yes, but no obsession over what did not get done. These sisters are not working to complete a caseload sheet for a social service agency. They are working for God. They begin their day with him, they end their day with him, and everything in between they present as an offering to God. He and he alone determines their worth, their success.
I see only one time when Jesus approached a state resembling anything like “burnout.” In the Garden of Gethsemane, he fell prostrate on the ground and prayed. Sweat fell from him like drops of blood. He “offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death,” Hebrews says (5:7), but of course he knew he would not be saved from death. As that awareness grew inside him, Jesus felt distress. He had no community to support him-they had all fallen asleep.
And yet a dramatic change took place. In Gethsemane we see a person in distress and anguish. After Gethsemane we see a person who, more than Pilate, more than Herod, is in utter control. Read the accounts of the trials. Jesus is no victim. He is serene, the master of his destiny.
What happened in the garden? What made the difference? We have few details of Jesus’ prayers (remember, the potential witnesses were sound asleep). He may have reviewed his entire ministry on earth. The weight of all that went undone may have borne down on him: his disciples were frail and undependable, the movement was at risk, the world was still home to evil and much suffering. Jesus himself seemed at the very edge of human endurance. He no more relished the idea of pain and death than you or I do.
Somehow, though, in Gethsemane Jesus worked through that crisis by transferring the burden to the Father. It was God’s will he had come to do, after all, and he resolved his prayer with the words, “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36). Not many hours later he could cry out, in profound truth, “It is finished” (John 19:30).
I pray for that sense of detachment, of trust. I pray that I could see my work, my life, as an offering to God each day. I have learned that God is a God of mercy, of compassion, of grace. He’s a trustworthy boss. He and he alone is qualified to help me negotiate the slippery path between love for others and love for myself-a path bordered by hypersensitivity and callus.
Philip Yancey is editor at large for CHRISTIANITY TODAY and lives in Evergreen, Colorado.
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
