You don’t have to be in the ministry long until you discover how susceptible you are to burnout. I want to spend a few days talking about burnout in ministry. What does it look like? Why does it happen? How can I protect myself from it?

Here’s what burnout looks like. It can be depleting yourself or exhausting your physical and mental resources. It can be wearing yourself out by excessively trying to reach unrealistic expectations.

Burnout can show its ugly head in three areas of your life.

1. Mentally. Burnout affects the way you think. When you burn out you feel disillusioned, bitter, cynical, irritable, and even guilty because you because you can’t be a super hero. Moses is a good example of this (Numbers 11).

2. Physically. Burnout creates symptoms of bodily pain, inability to sleep, digestive problems, even strokes and heart attacks in extreme cases. Epaphrodites had this problem (Phil. 2).

3. Spiritually. Burnout can create a hatred for life, hatred for work, emptiness of spirit, futility of long lasting achievements, and inability to sleep at night. Can you think of anyone who had this problem? What about Elijah in 1 Kings 19?

If you serve in children’s ministry, you are susceptible to burnout. Burnout isn’t just for high achievers (Ex. 18:13-18) and people-pleasers (Ex. 2:11-14) but everyone in ministry. Check back tomorrow for more.