I Need Rest and Refreshment
God's Word refers to the Christian life often as a walk, seldom as a run, and never as a mad dash.
Steven J. Cole
In When I Relax I Feel Guilty, Tim Hansel writes of his years as a coach and area director for Young Life: "I would work twelve, fourteen, even fifteen hours a day, six or seven days a week. And I would come home feeling that I hadn't worked enough. So I tried to cram even more into my schedule. I spent more time promoting living than I did living."1
Many pastors know what Hansel's talking about: Long days, short breaks, and the increasing ugliness of being busy, what one called "doing more but enjoying it less."
One jumbled, crowded page on a Day-Timer follows another. One committee meeting leads to another. One sermon is hardly done when the next one looms ahead. A pastor captured the feeling when he described his weekly schedule as "an overstuffed glove compartment."
The husband of one minister felt this frustration when he wrote: "The overwhelming, indeed the single, issue is how to support my friend and love in a profession that makes extraordinary and high demands on every aspect of her life. My job is much less demanding, and I can walk away from it every afternoon. But a minister is a target for all the brokenness brought into the church by its people — lay and ordained. A minister is a workhorse trying to pull an overloaded wagon uphill."2
That load easily leads to burnout. Lutheran psychiatrist Paul Qualben writes of the three stages toward burnout, ones originally described by Cary Cherniss in Staff Burnout:
1. The honeymoon stage, in which enthusiasm, commitment, and job satisfaction eventually give way; energy reserves begin to drain off.
2. The "fuel shortage" stage, characterized by exhaustion, detachment, ...
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