Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Brushing Off Exhaustion

I have said that, in ministry, if you feel tired then you are tired. It is an exhausting job, yet ministers so often tell themselves that, funny, they shouldn't be feeling this way, or that they really didn't do that much. It may be a recipe for disaster.  OBSERVATION: I myself suffered post-traumatic stress in 1990. At first thought to be acute stress reaction, it turned out to be (the more serious) PTSD. I had been admitted to hospital for observation for a night, for "exhaustion". I thought, that's a good one, very funny. But add trauma to a condition like that, which in my case included a man with a gun, and it's "tickets". Thankfully PTSD happened to me at thirty. Many ministers crash at fifty or sixty, and then it is almost too late to readjust and recover. Churches should (through love) help ministers work wisely with their available energy.

No comments: