Topic: Burnout and Ministry Fatigue — Key Scripture: Psalm 139:1,13
There is a version of losing yourself that happens all at once — the crisis, the breaking point, the moment where everything changes and you can point to it afterward and say: that is when it happened.
And then there is the other kind.
The slow kind. The kind that happens so gradually, across so many ordinary days of showing up and meeting demands and being what everyone needs you to be, that you do not notice it is happening until one day you look up and realize that the person you used to be — the one with ease and joy and a clear sense of who they were and what they loved — has quietly disappeared. And you cannot find the moment it happened because there was no moment. It was a thousand small moments. An accumulation. A slow draining.
You do not burn out in a single flame. You burn out the way a candle does — steadily, over time, until the light is simply gone.
I know this from the inside. After 24 years in pastoral ministry, there came a season where I looked in the mirror and did not recognize what I saw. Not physically. I mean the person behind the eyes. The version of me that had once moved through life with some sense of lightness and confidence and genuine delight in the work — that person had gone somewhere, and I did not know when, and I did not entirely know how to find my way back to him.
It had happened in the ordinary way it always happens. The demands of ministry expanding to fill every available hour. The needs of the congregation becoming the organizing principle of every week, every season, every year. The slow attrition of the things that had once replenished me — the stillness, the reading, the space to simply be a person rather than a role. And underneath all of it, the unaddressed grief, the burnout I had not named, the weight of things I had carried for others and never set down.
What I needed was not a new discipline or a better sabbath practice or a strategic plan for recovery. I needed someone to help me find my way back to myself. Back to the things that had once given me life. Back to some sense of who I actually was beneath all the doing.
The self that gets lost in the service of others does not disappear. It waits. And it can be found again.
This is some of the most important work that happens at BRKN Soul Care. Not because it presents dramatically — it often does not. People who have lost themselves in the doing are frequently still highly functional. They are still showing up. Still meeting expectations. Still appearing, to the outside world, like people who have it all together.
But in the session, when the space is safe enough and slow enough, something else emerges. The grief of what has been lost. The anger, sometimes, at the systems or the people or the seasons that took so much. The fear that the person they used to be is simply gone and is not coming back.
And then, carefully, the beginning of the thread. The slow process of tracing their way back — not really back to the life they knew before, because that only exists in history — but rather, back to the self that is integrated and whole and knows its own name again. Back to the self that God knows — the one He created.
“O Lord, you have searched me and known me! …for you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” — Psalm 139:1,13
This work is not linear. It does not follow a predictable arc. It requires the kind of patience and presence that cannot be rushed — a space that is willing to sit in the uncertainty of the in-between, the place where the old life is gone and the new life is not yet fully formed.
If you are in that place — if you can feel the distance between who you are now and who you used to be, if the joy has been gone long enough that you have almost stopped expecting it back, if you are still functioning but something essential is missing — you are not broken beyond repair.
You are someone who has given too much for too long without enough coming back in. And that is something that can be tended to. Slowly, carefully, with someone who is not in a hurry.
You are allowed to need help finding your way back. And BRKN Soul Care is open to help you do just that.
If this resonates with where you are today, BRKN Soul Care is here. Book a free Introductory Conversation at brknsoulcare.org and take the first step. You don’t have to carry this alone.