![This Pilgrim’s Progress [Lorraine Yeung]](http://www.lorraineyeung.com/index/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/this-pilgrims-progress-white1.png)
Winter Gallows, Aulschwitz
I find it hard to believe, admit or confess myself as being burnt out. I feel ashamed, pathetic and non-comparable to those who are truly burnt out in ministry or have more reason to be. I don’t feel I have a real reason to defend the overwhelming sense of despondency in my behavior.
I refuse to believe that I could be depressed, clinically slash chemically. I believe and hold true a conviction that I was released from the depression that once gripped me on the day of my salvation. I’m pretty sure the Holy Spirit said so. I believe and hold true that I have been healed from that sense of utter hopelessness. I am not fantasizing suicide or my funeral. I am not rendered completely hopeless and still hold faith and understanding that my state is for a season. I know that God will bring me out of the mire.
I do notice certain traits in this season, all unhealthy and all sinful some foolish. May my darkness be brought in to the light.
Introverting
I have a heightened wanting to be on my own, isolated, away from social pressures. I have an incredible urge to get away, escape. avoid. An avoidance of being in community, large gatherings. I am avoiding being exposed as weak or pathetic. I fear judgement from others and revert back to old habits. Already I see myself cutting people off, cutting out on relationships. I have a fear of being hurt by others. I defensively reject others before they can reject me.
Guilt and Shame: I don’t want to be around people. I feel exposed. Naked. Embarrassed. My pride does not want others seeing me as weak, immobile, or downcast
Pathetic: I feel pathetic, like a bit of a nut case. I don’t really feel like I’m out for any real reason. I don’t think I’m even burnt out compared to many church planters and missionaries. I feel very lame.
Identity: I’m not fully alert or seeking recovery. Almost finding self satisfaction in my identity within a crisis and my focus on myself as opposed of God
Emotionally Shutting Down
I am sensitive to critique and paranoid. Emotionally volatile, a simple “How’re you doing?” will set me off. Defensively I have become numb and apathetic, devoid of joy, unresponsive, narcotized to anything potentially emotive, provocative or deep. I find myself distracting myself with impressively lame iphone games. Avoiding reality. Wallowing making mud-pies in gutters and delighting in it when I could be making sandcastles on a beach.
Physically Tired
On my days off I will find myself having a heavy 4 hour nap where I pretty much lie comatose in deep sleep. I’m too tired to get up most mornings which is unlike me. Doing simple tasks are laborious and I find myself avoiding completely doing anything.
Resting From God
It goes back to a crisis in my identity. The turning inward to myself, looking in my own reflection, becoming narcissistic has a deadly sweetness to it. I find myself associating my troubles with the relationship with my Creator and abide in the lie that avoiding Him will avoid trouble.
Prayerless: Possibly the worst out of all, I am becoming faithless and prayerless. I am not seeking or asking for healing or restoration. I’m not asking for anything, thanking rarely and am not looking to Him, but at myself. Instead of looking to the light I look at my own darkness and make it a reference point to my world around me. God should be the centrepoint, not me…
Not completely hopeless
I will praise God again, I will find my joy in the God of my salvation.
5 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation (ESV)
My dad once told me a little story about working in the field in ever-expansive Saskatchewan, whereby you could look for about a mile or so and barely make out the house…Anyways, he said to me -for no apparent reason, other than I think it struck him as good advice to pass on, especially to his son…He said to me, “That although a person gets the feeling of being pretty well ‘on their own,’ they’re not; being that even in distance life is still working to keep us close.’
Let me explain somewhat, he also stated that sometimes when a piece of equipment would break down, you are miles from the house with the horses -in those days- and the only thing you could do was pray to get the problem fixed _and_ then even you still had to walk all the way back to the barn in the yard to get the necessary tools to get your plough or seeder fixed way out in the field. Which by chance you still had to take another horse out to _before_ even getting to the problem of fixing the broken equipment that allowed you to farm….Or you could stand there praying for someone to come along and help you, but the chances of that were pretty the distance between farms -about two to three miles, and even they would have been farming in the mid-day-. So you prayed and then you got on with it…Sort of a truce with God, but in a way that He would assist you personally with efficiency until you got back to where you needed to be in order to carry on plowing and working the field.
It was a good lesson in seeing how God works in and through everything. I then knew my dad knew the Lord, even though we never really got down to getting the systematic salvation requirements down pat (something I find that hinders talking about the Gift God’s given us through Christ anyways); he seemed to have come to know Him by first work and then by understanding that Jesus was co-equal in the Trinity.
I think I understand what you’re saying. Thanks for visiting again J, and for your encouragement as always. God’s taught me a lot during this season, and I suppose He’s picking me up off the ground, again… :) God Bless!