[EDITOR’S NOTE: I found this lovely essay from dear Malcolm… dating back to 10 April! Sorry it’s finding you so late, o gentle reader, but I know it’s an on-time Word for at least one person reading this *raises hand* :] God Bless and keep you always, friend <3 ]

Blessed morning everyone and welcome to yet another installment of the Nuggets of knowledge series
here at metanoiameans.com! today we will be discussing something that all of us as believers in and
followers of our lord Jesus Christ deal with at least once in our walks with him, Christian burnout.

But
what does that mean, to be burnt out? A burnout in terms of the physical human being and the physical
world is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress.
Based on how I understand it, as far as our walks with Christ go its over extending ourselves too early too
quickly too frequently and too completely. What might that look like? Praying to God and asking him
what scriptures to read for the day and deciding to read A LOT more than what he said.

For example lets
say he answers your prayer and wants you to read the book of genesis. That is quite the undertaking for
anyone especially a new believer being that that particular book of the bible is 50 chapters long and even
through an audio book would take several hours to get through. Now lets say you get through that, you
are tired and your eyes are very fatigued. However, you feel that in order to please God, you should go
above and beyond what he assigned you. This leads you to decide to read the entire book of psalms in that
same sitting.

For reference, the book of psalms is a collection of 150 sacred poems, or hymns with varying lengths.
Some of them are longer than a whole chapter in another book of the bible. So, if you were to consider
each psalm as a chapter in the bible, lets do that for the sake of argument here. You would be reading 200
chapters in one sitting. 150 chapters beyond your assignment. Such a massive undertaking could, would
and will affect the vast majority of believers negatively. Such a task would make us feel far less excited
about reading the bible the next time. This based on the amount of pure exhaustion we feel because of the
self-imposed addition to god’s original assignment.

Our lord knows us best, far better than we know
ourselves. We should always pray to him and ask him before we make ANY DECISIONS. He does love
it when we read his word but its not meant to go in one ear and out the other one. Its meant to take root in
us and help us to know him better. Its meant to change us for the better, into who he wants us to be. All
that we read in his word is meant to stay with us forever and always. It cannot do that to its full capability
if we are just reading to read and not for understanding.
Christian burnout doesn’t just occur when over extending yourself in scripture reading, it can occur in any
faith based activity or combination thereof that believers decide to over saturate and or over extend
themselves in. Even something as simple as prayer or charity can cause Christian burnout if we don’t go
to our heavenly father in prayer before undertaking something. Lets look at another example now,
volunteering at a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen. These two activities are wonderful ways to give back
to your community and help those less fortunate than yourself. However, you should as with everything
else always go to god in prayer about these ideas before making commitments to them. one may end up
over extending themselves with such endeavors by over booking themselves. Lets say the only day you
have time to volunteer would be Tuesday after 6 pm. That same day you have several projects due for
work, 3 meetings, 4 phone conferences, lunch with business partners and a doctors appointment. You
finish everything before your 6pm free time, 5:30 pm to be exact and you have JUST enough time to get
to the soup kitchen if you leave early from work. Having to leave early from work is an example of over
extension. Unless otherwise told by God, we should NEVER over extend ourselves in this way.

Our time
is precious and we should learn to manage it properly. Being as exhausted as you are from the abnormally
busy work day, you should be at home resting. Proper schedule management would have shown you that this particular day was not the day you should have slotted in time to volunteer. It should have been left
for the next Tuesday. Now, having irresponsibly left work early, you are at the soup kitchen, tired as you
are you prepare for your shift to help. You can barely stand because you are exhausted, you have your
attention divided trying to plan out how you are going to manage the next morning at the office and little
do you know you were just texted by your co worker that you have a strategy meeting tomorrow on the
back of their own lunch with perspective clients from the previous week. You are so exhausted and
mentally distracted that you cannot function properly in the soup kitchen for even 30 minutes, you are
noticed and asked to come back next week instead. If you had prayed about whether or not you should
volunteer this particular week it is highly likely that God would have suggested next week since it is far
less busy. However, you cannot know that because you didn’t ask him. if God himself had told you to
volunteer on that day, he would have made a way for you to do so and be as useful as possible. What our
gracious lord orders, he pays for.
At this point, some of you may be asking what the key is to avoiding Christian burnout. It’s simple
actually. prayer. Not only should we pray about EVERYTHING before doing ANYTHING but we should
pray during and after whatever it is we are given leave and latitude to do. We should pray for the wisdom
and strength needed to do whatever God gives us to do, we should pray for the time, means and
opportunity to do whatever he puts on our hearts to do and if we think of something that we want to do,
we should pray for permission to do it. No matter what the answer is we should always pray concerning
everything we do. Remember, our God pays for everything he orders. He knows what we can and cannot
do. He knows if we will ever be in a position where we can do what we ask to and also what he gives us
to do.

The next question that might be on your mind is what causes us to go into a burnout? The short version of
that answer is pride but, lets look deeper into that, shall we? So now lets look at this question, why do we
want to over extend ourselves for god? Well that is a trick question actually because the answer is that we
do not want to over extend ourselves for god but rather for ourselves. Why? Because it makes most of if
not all of us feel good to think “oh wow…im doing so much for god! He must be really happy and proud
of me!” the fact of the matter there is simple, if you did not pray about whatever it is that you think he
will be happy about and get conformation from him that he does indeed want you to do whatever it is,
then you are not operating within his will for you. If you are not operating within his will for you, you are
not making him proud no matter what you do. Not only are you not making him proud but you are not
working for him. rather you are working for the enemy. Lets refer back to the first example, the one with
the person with the over booked schedule. This person got so tired and physically burnt out that they
could not participate and be effective in what they wanted to do for god. What they wanted to do in that
moment for him was not what he wanted them to do. They could not have known that though because
they did not speak to him about it through prayer first. Within this series, I did an article on pride and how
devastating it can be to our spiritual health. With pride being the driving force behind our over exertion, it
is easy to see how devastating Christian burnout can be.
In closing, I encourage you all to always speak to god about whatever you want to do for him, assess the
reason why you want to do it and never do anything unless he gives you clear and unquestionable
permission to do whatever it is.

Thank you all for reading, I hope to see you again soon. My our loving God bless you all in the name of
Jesus.