Don’t Burnout!
“Even the youths shall faint and be weary,” Isaiah 40:30
If you bend a plant, once you release it, it goes back to its previous upright position, but if you keep bending it further and further, it could get broken and stay down.
With stress, first, you bend, and then you recover.
With burnout, first, you bend, and then you break, and you stay broken.
Burnout is not a figment of your imagination or a sensationalised diagnosis by psychologists.
Exhaustion is real; it’s common, and it’s dangerous. It leads to irritability, anger, paranoia, headaches, ulcers, depression, and suicide.
Burnout causes something inside you to break; you don’t care who sees or hears; you just want out.
The good news is you can recover your passion, enthusiasm, productivity, and excellence, but it takes time, and the healing is mostly by growing into new depths. Let the word of God come alive in you again.
Burnout is common among the spiritually minded who are sensitive. They see pain and internalise it. They want to help the wounded. They don’t realise they were never designed to carry the world on their backs.’
So what’s the remedy? Lean on God. Psalm 91:1. But to receive the benefits of Psalm 91, you need to meet its conditions by making God your dwelling place, abiding in Him, and submitting to His authority.
‘I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress … in Him will I trust’ Psalm 91:2.
Note the word ‘say’. What you say can mean life or death. Proverbs 18:21. It can put you over the top or put you under. So as you read God’s Word, internalise and personalise and verbalise it, and your life will take an upward swing.