BRKN Soul Care

A place where you are seen, heard, and never alone.

BRKN Soul Care

A place where you are seen, heard, and never alone.

SOUL MATTERS — THE BRKN BLOG

  • Losing Yourself in the Doing — The Slow Erasure of Ministry and Caregiving

    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…

  • Take Up Your Mat — Why Jesus Told a Healed Man to Carry His Suffering

    Topic: Kintsugi and Redemption   —   Key Scripture: John 5:6-9 “When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, ‘Do you want to be healed?’ The sick man answered him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Get up, take up your bed, and walk.’ And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the…

  • The Friends Who Said Nothing — What Job 2 Teaches Us About Presence

    Topic: Ministry of Presence   —   Key Scriptures: Job 2:11-13, Job 42:7-9 “Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that had come upon him, they came each from his own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They made an appointment together to come to show him sympathy and comfort him. And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him. And they raised their voices and wept, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads toward heaven. And they sat with him on the ground seven days…

  • You Are Not Too Much

    Topic: Soul Care Basics   —   Key Scriptures: Luke 8:43-48, John 5:1-9, Matthew 26:36-46 Somewhere along the way, many people learn a painful lesson: Their grief is too heavy. Their needs are too complicated. Their pain takes up too much space. And so they begin the long work of making themselves smaller — of managing the presentation of their inner life so that it fits inside the bandwidth others have available for it. They become very good at not being too much. This is an enormous thing to carry. And it goes largely unacknowledged, because the people who are most practiced…

  • Grief Without a Name — For the Losses That Don’t Come With a Funeral

    Topic: Grief and Trauma Awareness   —   Key Scripture: The Psalms We know what to do with certain kinds of grief. When someone dies, there are rituals for it. A funeral, a gathering, people who bring food and say the right things and acknowledge, formally and publicly, that a loss has occurred. The grief has a name. It has a date. It has a context that the people around you understand and respond to. This kind of grief is devastating. But it is, in some ways, the kind of grief that gets the most support. Because it is obvious and expected.…