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Lifeway Leadership Podcast Network. Good day, I'm Derek Hanna. Welcome to the one thing a podcast designed to give you one solid practical tip for gospel centred ministry every single week. Well, if you're joining us, this is the second episode in a three week series we're doing on burnets. So my encouragement would be go back and listen to the first episode. We're doing

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this series because the last two years have been challenging to say the least for the entire world. But particularly for the people who might listen, those five people who listen to the one thing, who are in full time gospel ministry in all different facets, it's provided a unique challenging, stressful time to do ministry in a very uncertain environment. And often what we've seen is it's not at the moment of crisis that people feel burnt out. It's 12, 18 months after the

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impact, which is about now from when the pandemic started. In fact, now most of Australia is in lockdown again. So we put together this series to help you understand a little bit more about burn out to hit it off of the past or if you're experiencing it to pull back to talk to someone to work at how you can get out of there. Last week we explored with Dr Jonathan Andrews, a John O what Burnett was today we're going to look and hear from him about the three levels of connectedness, which feed into and help us be healthy. So let me throw over to John O for our second

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episode on Burnett. Last time we spoke the thing that we raised just at the end of that conversation was around three types of connections. Can you just quickly, because I want to unpack that this conversation and the implications around Burnett and those things, can you just quickly recap those three points of connection for us? Well, I think connection has had to find in the book as a binding process. If our cells bind into something else and finding some sort of synchronism,

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finding some sort of rapport, I think we can find some sort of connection with impersonal things. Like people might talk about connection with a mountain, with a skiing or connection with the surf, with the surfing and so on. But primarily the connection points that I talk about in the book are interpersonal, so person-person and person-person with God. And there are three way connections. So it's a connection that we have with God as mentioned, as I've just mentioned, connection that

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we have with other people as I've mentioned, and connection that we have with ourselves. I think if you tie all of those three things together, that's the best recipe for rebuilding the broken heart. It's a bit like putting the scaffolding around to cane building. You put those things together and you're ready to repair. Is the order, even if God others self, is the order important? I don't want to read into it, but have you arranged that in your book and in your thinking in

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particular way? That's a really interesting question. I think because so many of those connection points are actually contingent upon each other. I would be soon prepared to say that I would say that they're not, I'll be prepared to say that they're equal, as well. Because if you are connected with yourself, then you're not going to be as connected with others and you're not

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connected with God. It becomes a guessing game for others when you're not connected with yourself, because you have less to reveal about yourself. What do you mean less to reveal about yourself? What do you mean? Well, someone asks you how you go and if you're burnt out, you go, fine, meh, but if you haven't spent time being curious about yourself, where you go, gosh, how did this start? What circumstances did it start? How do I actually feel about this?

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Where am I going? Do I belong? What are the feelings of it? If you don't do any of that stuff, then what people are left with is a very impoverished view or experience of you, because you haven't connected with yourself, so you say, fine, whatever, meh, and so on. That's all they can take from those conversations, so they end up feeling like, well, they don't really know you, but the real of the reason why they don't really know you is because you don't really know you either. And of course, this is exactly what happens vertically as well as horizontally. So in your prayer life,

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you go to God and you say, do God feel tired? Then you go, then you sigh, and then you go, okay, can you please help me not to feel so tired? But that's a very different prayer than saying I think I'm not sure if I belong because my values are slightly different than the church that I mean. I don't feel like I'm loved because of that. I feel like I'm a bit different. I'm beginning to

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wonder if I'm inadequate because I'm not in the top of my work, I'm not procrastinating. Lord, can you please be with this person who doesn't belong and sometimes feel inadequate? And even just the question, God, do you know what it's like to feel or miss a lot of it? And of course, people don't answer that question, but that rushes in a much deeper connection because that person doing the prayer has become connected with themselves.

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So that's interesting. It's interesting in the reformed heritage that we both exist in, having existed in the city. Absolutely. But it's interesting, we would nearly always, I think, you push back if you think it's right. We would nearly always say the our relationship with God is far and away the primary relationship we should have. That's not actually what I'm hearing you push back against. What I'm hearing you say is there's an interconnectedness to these things

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that one suffers when the other one, yes, is poor. Absolutely. And when it was to take them on board or if I still observe the churches that I attend to, the first one, connection with God, is something that we're typically really good at as a church and that gets emphasized in prioritized and such. So we're really good at the first one connecting with God. We are moderately good at the second one, which is connecting with other people and we are poorly bad at the last one, which is connecting with ourselves. Why is that? That's a great question

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because I'm not sure. I don't have a really good answer to that question and I'd certainly be open to input from other people about how that came to pass or how that came to be deprioritized. You see some of the common themes and patterns like poor spending 14 years in Arabia or even Jesus spending 30 days in the desert. I wondered to myself, are we saying there that there was no

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self-reflection? There was no ordering of priorities. It was just focusing on other people. What was it focusing on other people? There's just focusing on God. I suspect not. It's my answer. I think other people can come up with much better answers. That's a great question. I'm not one of those people to come up with a better answer, but I am reflecting as you're talking and thinking one of the natures of reformed evangelicalism is a denial of self in there.

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So me talking too much about myself feels like the wrong emphasis. It's in context that absolutely. So when I'm leading the service of church, I'm not leading with me. There's something but I think that can bleed into every so the thing I talk about in every context. I don't want to reveal too much of myself because that would be about me. There's an unhealthiness there where it goes to the extreme of every relationship in every context. I don't talk about me because

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I need to talk about. I think that's probably a really fruitful reflection and line of inquiries. What sort of self are we there to deny? I sat Lebride many, many years ago and felt incredible blessed with one of the dissidents of one of the broader family members of the Shafen family said to me, John, you think that God is personality, denying, but the God of the Bible was

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personality-fulfilling? And to be honest, what I heard after that conversation was, I didn't hear anything. At one stage, I thought I can hear my eyelids open and close. I was laughing. I was like, I don't know. Of course I didn't, but it really struck me at that point that there's a distinction to be made between the self that ought to go at the foot of the cross and be left there. Selfishness, greed, these sort of narcissistic elements that unfortunately I carry around with myself and don't become a God. And they need to be put to death. They need to be

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put away. And it's that sort of self that there's people away. But there's another sort of self that I think it'd be a real mistake to go from the cross and try to deal away with, which is you know, my role in my household to like, I'm there to love people, Kylie and all four of my kids and they're deserving of that. And that's a really significant role that no one else has in this world. And so for me to put away that sort of self, I don't think that's been called for.

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Yeah, that's good. Well, that might be a topic for another conversation. Sorry, that's a good one. Could I push into this idea of a round ball, burnout thinking of broader and deeper as we think back as last conversation we mentioned exhaustion, you know, can be something that you're seeing burnout, but it's not necessarily the same thing. And this is much broader, but you also mentioned deeper. Talks about broader and deeper explain that. Yeah, I think moving out from moving out from

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our heart into our coping behaviors, into our cognitions and even out into our social environments, to our work environments, the first thing that you see in most people who have burned out is high expectations that are imposed on someone. The most obvious one is the hours of work that we have to do.

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So looking at that aspect, but moving further closer into things like cognitions and the way that we think are often high expectations are a part of that either they're internally sort of generated or they're imposed on it. So then we have high number of hours of work they're expected and then we have high expectations. And you know, unrelenting or rigid, inflexible sort of standards

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that you can't make an impact on. So if you can't have any influence over the amount of hours that you can do, then your sense of control goes down and that gets compromised, which is automatically linked to stress. Stress in and of itself is not always such a bad thing. Like I have it, I get quite stressed, don't I, I'm in machine in the garage. Right. If you saw me, you'd be in test of that. I've heard how much you wrote that. I couldn't do that. I get stressed with that.

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But you know, when it's, when it's brief, when the stressful period is brief and the stressful period ends and it's followed by rest, there can be quite good for the human system. So it's not always bad, but if the stress is relentless and there is no recovery, then it's going to be really unfortunate because your body is filled with cortisol, your cortisol is getting you ready for some sort of action, but it just sits in your system and it flows on to physical things. I'm not sleeping that well. I've

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I've been off for teeth. And that's part of the go now. Like we talked about in the last episode, that's one of the cardinal features of the go now. So we're moving from the outside in now. So we've gone to sort of environment expectations hours of work, but also those cognitions where we get kind of cynical that end up in resentment and it gets into our biology. So we're not sleeping that well. It gets into us when we're coping behaviors. So we start picking up on the addictions, like pornography and alcohol. And then moving closer into the heart, motivation is gone. There's

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not much petrol left in our system. We don't have much control. And then up come issues of, you know, not belonging, I think, because, you know, I miss a line here and think like value what I do. And this can go further back into our history as well. So we, you can tap into previous experiences that a lot of people have had where they haven't felt valued. They haven't felt a part of things they've felt aligned. And so people can have other things in their in their past that

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come back up to revisit them and that exacerbates a lot of things. You took family of origin issues yeah, past experiences, yeah. Life events, yeah, difficulties with bullying at school, for example, like a column coming off. But yeah, growing up in families where maybe they weren't asked and some of the standards that were imposed upon they had no pushback on those sort of things, you know, parental attitude and lack of safety and and rapport, you know, lack of praise, like a wall with

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that sort of stuff. Does this push into the connected to self so on awareness of those things and how they impact you? Is that the kind of connected to self-path that you're identifying? Yeah, absolutely. Because we all grow up thinking that what we grow up with is normal, it's universal. And it's not, it's not until you get to a time of your life where you experience other families and you grow and you insight that you go, you begin to question that you got, you know, you sit at another person's family table and you're late teens or early 20s and you go,

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gosh, this is really different. What's happening here? But without that sort of reflection, we end up thinking, you know, what I'm going through is just whatever I'm going through. And that isn't something to normalize terribly quickly. If you don't feel like you belong and you're connected from yourself, you're not sleeping that well and you feel a bit of loan and disenchanted in this world, both with your relationship, God and relationship with other

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people. But this isn't something to normalize. And the reason for that is because you may will cease to be a blessing to normal people. And I think in the in the Burnack conversations well, part of what I'm certainly what I experienced and certainly what I've seen other people as well is Burnack gets normalized. Yeah, it gets. Yeah, you get into a process or a place in ministry in life where it's hard and you're tired and you're not coping. Yeah. And you feel like

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you're navigating the driving on the road of life with that tires on is just getting all over the place. And I think this is this is just ministry. Yeah, this is just what it's like. Yeah, how much is that? It's terrible. So to an eye because you do normalize that moment. And then you do what you need to do in order to stay there and you're pulling what you've mentioned before is your environment addiction, all those kinds of things in order to maintain the unhealthiness. In fact, my experience was you get worse. Oh, time, you normalize that, it gets

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worse. Yeah. Because you yeah, as you say, do normalizing and abnormal experience. It's how unfortunate. I was a friend, a colleague who became a mum and over the internet, I sent her a picture of John McClain, you know, yelling out the window, yelling down. Die hard, you know, die hard yelling down. Welcome to the party pal.

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Because my friend who had a baby, you know, she's doing a tough and I say welcome to the party. And it's it's so unfortunate. You know, we have these people who it's as if you're ministering at the same response. You burn it out, you're exhausted, you're working to many hours and it's as if some of us say, well, welcome to the party now. And that is really unfortunate because I mean, one of the great things that happened here is I came to a Geneva Bush sort of information. Yeah. And there was Pierre and Catherine.

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Three years, right? And they were talking about just a just a lovely beautiful experience where I think they had a a Charlie the play group, the child invited a mum. The mum came along, started reading the Bible with Catherine. So those guys are out past it. That's right. Yeah, central church out of the suite of plant there. And they do a great job. And well, the the thing that really struck me is this mum said to Catherine at the end of one time when

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they're sharing what happened in the Bible that she can wait to find out what happened next in the story. Now this strikes me as one of the great examples of what needs to happen more. For those we don't we don't need to have this picture of, you know, welcome to the party power, or bird town, right? And normalize that away or even worse, tell people that they're just going to toughen up a bit. We're going to have this we're going to have we're going to step back and say, hold on, when you started this journey, this long journey of study and being underpaid on my diet,

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this long journey towards this what attracted you to it? What was what was magical to your about it? And to what extent is to engage in those things? Yeah. And if you can, and if you can still engage in those things and draw a satisfaction for them. And if you can get on top of your workload and make some accomplishments and grow as a professional person, then you're really going to safeguard yourself against being burned out.

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But if you can't and we normalize being burned out, well one is that's a serious oversight because in the last podcast we were talking about, you know, this is a predictor of future and the present use of hospitalisation and cardiac events. So it's one thing to be able to toughen up, but it's a serious oversight because this is potentially a serious issue. But on just that other level, the hell's sad, is that? How am I? I got into this gig because

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there was something really beautiful about it and now I'm just divorced from what's beautiful about it and I'm bit overwhelmed and I'm not in control and I'm not growing as a professional person. Yeah. And this is where for the genuptial network and the rich Australian network as well, one of the things that I love about being a part is you are rubbing shoulders with people who have those biblical convictions. So this is why we need to, we want to see the loss come

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now, Jesus. We want to see God's people grow to be like Jesus. We'll be healthy and whole in that. But there's no, it's hard work doing that. So how do you maintain that? Part of it is being connected to other people to remind you of why you started to speak wisdom into those points where you are, where you are just saying, I'm going to toughen up and keep through it as they know, you're part of the creation, not the creator itself. And so get some differentiation there.

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But there is a yet, there is that connectedness of the network with other people as well. That's not your own. It's a network. But how do you get connected with people around that? That's for me, that's been one of the big things as well. How do you get people connected around? I've just been connected with people who have a, who can encourage you, who can have shared experiences with you around the difficulties of it. Not saying to you, hey, just tap out and go work

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at the Apple Store, which has always been my dream, just working the Apple Store low stress. But say remember, remember why it is and how do we wisely move? And you see in that, this is the case in point where we started today, the chat is that to do that, you will have to connect with yourself. You can't go back and remember what it is that drove you. What experience you had, what conversation you had, what moment in time that you had in your prayer life or ring the barbell where you develop a

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conviction or a love for this sort of work. But you can't do that without connecting with yourself. But it's so wise to do that because this is part of your call. Well, that was the second episode on Burnout of our three-week series on this topic. Can I encourage you just as we finish this episode? Once again, if you feel like you're heading into Burnout or you'll feel like you're in Burnout and you need to talk to someone you don't have someone, please contact us. There are professionals across the country that we can put you

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in contact with in order to begin this conversation in order for you to continue what to get back to doing healthy gospel ministry that you love and enjoy as we serve our God together. So please, contact us if you don't have someone to talk to. All the things we reference in this episode, you can find in the show notes. We're going to round out this three episode series next week as we talk about the tensions in the Burnout discussion. But thanks a day for joining us for the one thing.