So how to cope with burnout when you feel it crouching at your door? Legacy Youth Ministry Resources has a good article about detecting and coping with burnout. Here are their suggestions for someone feeling overwhelmed:

1. Take a break and get some rest. Understand your physical limitations and accept them. God probably has much less expectations of you than you have of yourself.
2. Change the habits in your life that are unhealthy – whether eating, sleeping, exercise, etc.
3. Write out a clear statement of your specific calling in ministry. Share this with a close friend. Make a commitment to not accept any offers that do not fit clearly into this calling and ask this friend to help you make decisions accordingly.
4. Make a list of everything you do in a week. Draw a line through anything that doesn’t help you accomplish God’s calling in your life. Next, underline the things that you do that could be done by someone else. Write the name of that person next to this thing. Delegate! What are left with should be the things that ONLY you can do. If these things are really God?s will, you have enough time to accomplish them without burning out. If not, you still need to draw some lines through more things.
5. Designate one day a month for solitude. Find a place with no distractions (including your mobile phone) and spend the most part of one day there.
6. Make a list of all the people that you spend time with on a regular basis. Next to each name, determine if they are drainers, average, teachable or fillers. If you find that you are not spending most of your times with the latter two, make the necessary changes.
7. Review your vision statement and the goals that you have set to accomplish this. If you have not yet written these things on a piece of paper, do this during your day of solitude at the monastery.

Read the full article at Legacy Youth Ministry Resources.

Those are easier said than done; of course. For further help with burnout, see also Say No to Burnout by Elizabeth Skoglund of the Psychology for Living ministry.

Have you lived through the nightmare of personal or professional burnout? How did you make it through, and what would you say to somebody who feels burnout coming on?

What do you think?

Probably not. I’ve never met anyone who took Friday the 13th, or any of those thousands of other little superstitions, seriously (although it’s interesting how long they’ve stuck around, given that few people give them any credence). Americans, and Christians in particular, aren’t a superstitious lot… or are they?

This morning, I took stock of my life to see if anything I did could be called “superstitious.” And I was surprised to realize that in fact, I often act on what you might call “Christian superstitions.”

By “Christian superstitions,” I mean spiritual activities performed not because they contribute to my life as a Christian, but out of fear, routine, or a sense of obligation. When I do “Christian activities” mindlessly, out of guilt, or “just because I’m supposed to,” those activities become little more than dumb superstitions. Here are a few examples from my life:

How often have I mumbled the same old prayer before meals without giving any thought to what I was saying? Surely, a prayer in which I am not even paying attention to the words has no value at all.

How often have I gone to church on Sunday morning out of a sense of “Christian obligation” rather than a desire to worship? If I’ve just spent an hour sitting in the church pew daydreaming about the latest Batman movie or worrying about work, I’ve just wasted an hour of my life on a pointless activity.

How often have I dropped money in the offering plate at church because I’m expected to, and not because I want to gratefully give back to God? I may be helping the Kingdom of God financially, but the activity is robbed of any of the spiritual import it’s meant to have. If I give of my time or money for no other reason than “that’s what Christians are supposed to do” or out of a vague sense of guilt, that’s just empty superstition.

As you can see, I can be quite good at taking praiseworthy spiritual activities and turning them into meaningless religious routine. I don’t think that’s much more useful than avoiding black cats on Friday the 13th.

What about you? Every Christian must struggle at some point with the challenge of keeping our daily and weekly spiritual activities from becoming empty routine. How do you stay on guard against this tendency toward superstition?

[Photo by flickr user rachdian; used under a Creative Commons license.]

What do you think?

Today, in the twentieth century, Jesus does not speak to us and teach us as He did early in the morning in the temple, but He still speaks to us through His Word, God’s Word the Holy Bible. We have the benefit of hearing the very same teaching that these heard who came at the dawning of the day to the temple. We can sit at the feet of Jesus today by reading His Word.

H. A. Ironside told of a godly man named Andrew Frazer, who had come to southern California to recover from a serious illness. Though this Irishman was quite weak, he opened his worn Bible and began expounding the truths of God’s Word in a way that Ironside had never heard before. So moved by Frazer’s words was Ironside, that his curiosity drove him to ask, “Where did you learn these things? Did you learn them in some college or seminary?” The sickly man said, “My dear young man, I learned these things on my knees on the mud floor of a little sod cottage in the north of Ireland. There, with my open Bible before me, I used to kneel for hours at a time and ask the Spirit of God to reveal Christ to my soul and to open the Word to my heart. He taught me more on my knees on that mud floor than I ever could have learned in all the seminaries or colleges in the world.”

To spend time in the Word of God yields a much richer understanding of the deep things of theology than to spend time in a classroom. For the person denied a formal education in Bible and theology there is no shame if we spend time at the feet of Jesus. From early in the morning, throughout the day, and into the evening hours the great scholars of the Word become so because of time spent in God’s Book and on their knees. Each of us has the same opportunity to do that. Let’s take that opportunity today.

Read the full devotional at Back to the Bible.

What’s the state of your Bible study and reading today? Do you hear Jesus’ voice of teaching and encouragement when you read the Bible? Do you need to spend more time learning at Jesus’ feet by reading God’s Word?

Here’s an answer from Dan Seaborn of Winning at Home, a Christ-centered family ministry:

A wise counselor friend once told me that the best way to deal with family members—especially difficult ones—is to simply be a family member to them. What he meant by this was that we should make efforts to bring the very best of family into the relationship. We should lead with love, reaching out to our relatives even when they hurt, annoy, and offend us.

This sounds much less complicated than it really is, of course, because past hurts can run deep, and because if there’s anybody on earth who can really get under your skin, it’s family.

Think about it, though. How would things change if you made an effort to bring the black sheep a little closer to the fold? What would be different if you practiced extra patience, built a bridge, agreed to disagree?

Now, I’m not going to say that there shouldn’t be any accountability or that we should turn a blind eye to real problems.

Still, there should come a time when you acknowledge that this family you’ve got is the only one you’ve got. It might never be perfect, but it will always be worth making a phone call, having a conversation, having a laugh.

Read the complete answer at the Winning at Home website.

Do you agree? Are you looking at any difficult family gatherings this holiday season, and if so, how do you deal with difficult family members with Christlike grace? And for extra credit, rephrase the question to ask how we should deal with the “black sheep” in the church family—is your answer to that any different than your answer to the original question?

What do you think?

I have no problem with anyone finding a good holiday sale at these or other stores, of course. But I can’t escape a twinge of despair at the thought of this annual celebration of consumerism. It’s partly guilt at the thought of so much money that will be spent on luxury goods and gadgets; it’s partly frustration that Black Friday is ironically linked to a holiday in which Americans (in theory) express their gratitude for and contentment with God’s blessings. And after the horror at a Long Island Wal-Mart last year, the thought of people stampeding through store aisles makes me feel somewhat ill.

What’s a Christian to make of all this? We can decry the excesses of consumer culture and the commercialization of the holidays… but that message, which I’ve heard repeated every year since I first watched the Peanuts Christmas special, feels these days less like a bold spiritual statement and more like a dreary and obligatory annual Culture War complaint. We can abstain from Black Friday and the frenzied consumerism it represents, or at least moderate our participation. But what’s something positive we can do as we head into another holiday season marked by sales and rebates rather than spiritual reflection?

This year, I’m going to use the beginning of the holiday sale season as a time to plan out how I and my family are going to live this Christmas. I’m not going to stop with the usual questions about Christmas shopping lists; this year I want to actively chart what we want to accomplish and think about during Thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas. I’m going to ask the questions that usually get put off until the last minute, when holiday stress and expenses are high:

What will my prayer and devotional life be like over the holidays? Is there a particular book, devotional, or study I want to work through?

Are there any habits or behaviors God is calling me to give up?

What holiday programs in my community do I want to get involved with?

Who do I want to spend extra time with this holiday season?

What charities and organizations do we want to support this holiday season?

Who in my community is going to need some extra help (financially, emotionally, or something else) this Christmas? How will I help them?

What other questions should I be asking as the holiday season begins? Will you join me this winter in setting the holiday catalogues aside for a while, and making sure to ask these questions before the holiday madness distracts us?

What do you think?

The goal of the project is to provide family and personal portraits to people in need. For some, this will be the first and only portrait they ever have taken. Aside from taking the picture, printing it and delivering it, Help Portrait urges the photographers to take time to get to know the people they’re photographing: cook them a meal, talk to them, serve them.

The below video has more information:

So why is this important? After all, there’s a lot of money and time going into this movement that could be spent on other things. And more to the point, why is this important for Christians?

Personally, I feel that as children of God we’re called to celebrate the beauty in Creation. Yes, we live in a world tainted by sin, but art gives us an amazing outlet through which we can explore aspects of this world that still reflect, however dimly, the perfection of Eden.

Portraits in particular are a way to highlight hidden and often-overlooked characteristics of their subject. When a photographer—or any artist for that matter—lovingly crafts an image of a person, that image can show a side of the person you barely knew existed: the beautiful, the cool, the composed, the handsome, the joyful.

For the Christian photographer, showcasing the good and interesting in people also showcases the good and interesting in God. Art gives us a distant but compelling glimpse of God’s original Creation.

Do you know anyone who is involved with Help Portrait? Do you think you might volunteer to help out? How can photography and other art forms point the way to God?

Editor’s note: While Help Portrait is not explicitly Christian, it’s interesting to note that Help Portrait was partially inspired by Advent Conspiracy.

While I doubt anyone would argue that Christians should remain wholly ignorant of the beliefs of other religions, I do wonder what your approach is to learning about other religions.

How much should we learn about other religions?

Share your thoughts!

A few years ago, two or three of my colleagues and I were in a country dominated for decades by Marxism. Before we began our meetings, we were invited to a dinner hosted by some common friends, all of whom were skeptics and, for all practical purposes, atheists. The evening was full of questions, posed principally by a notable theoretical physicist in the country. There were also others who represented different elements of power within that society. As the night wore on, we got the feeling that the questions had gone on long enough and that we were possibly going in circles.

I asked if we could have a word of prayer with them, for them, and for the country before we bade them good-bye. There was a silence of consternation, an obvious hesitancy, and then one said, “Of course.” We did just that—we prayed. In this large dining room of historic import to them, with all the memories of secular power plastered within those walls, the prayer brought a sobering silence that we were all in the presence of someone greater than us. When we finished, every eye was moist and nothing was said. They hugged us and thanked us, with emotion written all over their faces. The next day when we met them, one of them said to me, “We did not go back to our rooms last night till it was early morning. In fact, I stayed in my hotel lobby most of the night talking further. Then I went back to my room and gave my life to Jesus Christ.”

I firmly believe that it was the prayer that gave them a hint of the taste of what worship is all about. Their hearts had never experienced it.

Over the years I have discovered that praying with people can sometimes do more for them than preaching to them. Prayer draws the heart away from one’s own dependence to leaning on the sovereign God. The burden is often lifted instantly. Prayer is only one aspect of worship, but one that is greatly neglected in the face of people who would be shocked to hear what prayer sounds like when the one praying knows how to touch the heart of God. To a person in need, pat answers don’t change the mind; prayer does.

Read the complete devotional at Ravi Zacharias’ website.

Pointing people to God doesn’t always mean handing out tracts, preaching to them, or outwitting them in an apologetics debate—sometimes it’s as simple as showing them what worship means in your own life.

The monuments we build in the aftermath of battle reflect what a culture finds important. For all of its foibles, the United States is a nation built of and for its people, and nowhere is that shown more perfectly than in the way we memorialize those people who’ve died for it. The Tomb of the Unknown Solider is our country’s way of saying the unidentified will not be forgotten; that we appreciate each drop of blood and sweat spent in service to us.

The Tomb is important to Americans because it represents our remembrance of those who gave their lives for our freedom. Yet the tomb can be important to Christians too. It also stands as a sobering reminder that our service on this earth rarely ends in accolades and medals. Sometimes it ends in obscurity, and it’s only the truly humble that will take walk that path.

Jesus talked a lot about serving one another. He stated that:

 ¹³Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13, King James Version)

And

 ⁴⁵For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45, King James Version).

It is this picture of service that we should strive for: laying down our lives expecting nothing except to be counted last and among Christ’s chosen. And while not every solider goes into service with a selfless attitude, far more do than we give them credit most of the time.

Earlier this year my family laid my grandfather to rest in an Army cemetery. They gave him a 21-gun salute with all the pomp and circumstance he deserved. He served in World War II and lived a long and generally happy life full of love of his family and country.

Unless you’re cognizant of it, Veteran’s Day could just be yet another of those annoying days during which the post office is closed, and the Tomb one of those things you just have to be quiet around—which is a shame, because spending a day and giving a place to honor our servicemen and women is ultimately a small matter. Today is the one time we stop to say thanks for doing the unenviable job of serving us. Even the one’s who might never be known by name.

What veterans are in your life? What are you doing to celebrate them?

There’s a great deal of ignorance, confusion, and fear in Christian circles surrounding this issue. Where Christians in the past have been all too quick to blame depression and other types of mental illness on weak faith or Satanic influence, I suspect they’re more likely these days to try to ignore it—as a few wrenching testimonies in the Internet Monk post demonstrate. I grew up in a fairly close Christian community and never heard any talk of clinical depression, bipolar disorder, or other mental illnesses, although I learned years later that several friends and even family members had serious bouts with mental illness. This silence on the issue, and our reluctance to talk about medication and counseling outside the church, must make life very difficult for some of our suffering brothers and sisters in Christ.

The unease about mental illness is understandable, to an extent—anyone who’s lived through serious depression or knows somebody who has can tell you that it’s a harrowing experience that doesn’t lend itself well to inspirational stories or pat resolutions. I have often wondered if the church’s difficulty with the issue has its roots in a gnostic, unbiblical belief that our minds are completely separate and disconnected from the rest of our bodies. We readily acknowledge that our bodies can be afflicted by physical maladies, but we tend to imagine that our minds can be influenced only by God, Satan, and our own willpower.

What’s your experience with this issue? How has your church responded to instances of mental illness in your community, and was it a positive experience? Is the church finally getting a handle on the challenge of mental illness?