 |
Featured in Pray! magazine.  |
| Our Mission | Our Programs | Our People | Our Events | Our Resources | Contact Us |
|
Home
|
ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE plants in nature is the lbervillea sonorae. It can exist for seemingly indefinite periods without soil or even water. As Annie Dillard tells the story, one was kept in a display case at the New York Botanical Garden for seven years without soil or water. For seven springs it sent out little anticipatory shoots looking for water. Finding none, it simply dried up again, hoping for better luck next year. Now that's what I call perseverance: hanging on, keeping on when it's not easy. But perseverance has its limits, even for the lbervillea sonorae. In its eighth year of no water, the rather sadistic scientists at the New York Botanical Gardens had a dead plant on their hands. Most of us know what it's like to find ourselves past our seventh season, bereft of water, thirsty, and waiting for the eighth spring. No more energy and barely enough hope to send out one more pathetic little shoot. And it happens to us more like seven or eight times a year. Would that we could last like that tough little desert plant. Sometimes it's simple fatigue that finally takes its toll. Too much work, a lingering illness come singly or in combination, and we find ourselves desperately in need of a good night's sleep, a day off, a walk in the park, or an antibiotic. That's all there is to it. Simple fatigue, simple treatment, and we snap back like a rubber band. Deeper meaning But there may be a deeper meaning to our thirst and fatigue. John Sanford paints a picture of this in his description of an old well that stood outside the front door of a family farmhouse in New Hampshire. The water from the well was remarkably pure and cold. No matter how hot the summer or how severe the drought, the well was always source of refreshment and joy. The faithful old well was big part of his memories of summer vacations at the farmhouse. The years passed and eventually the farmhouse was modernized. Wiring brought electric lights, and indoor plumbing brought hot and cold running water. The old well was no longer needed, so it was sealed for use in possible future emergencies. But one day, years later, Sanford had a hankering for the cold, pure water of his youth. So he unsealed the well and lowered a bucket for a nostalgic taste of the delightful refreshment he remembered. He was shocked to discover that the well that once had survived the severest droughts was bone dry! Perplexed, he began to ask questions of the locals who knew about these kinds of things. He learned that wells of that sort were fed by hundreds of tiny underground rivulets which seep a steady flow of water. As long as the water is drawn out of the well, new water will flow in through the rivulets, keeping them open for more to flow. But when the water stops flowing, the rivulets clog with mud and close up. The well dried up not because it was used too much, but because it wasn't used enough! Sanford observed that our souls are like that well.' If we do not draw on the living water that Jesus promised would well up in us like a spring (John 7:38), our hearts close and dry up, and we find ourselves in our "eighth season." The consequence for not drinking deeply of God is to eventually lose the ability to drink at all. Prayerlessness is its own punishment, both its disease and its cause. That's the deeper meaning to our fatigue in the ministry. Acedia So like people dying of thirst in the desert, we stagger exhausted and aimless through our days. Preaching, teaching, training, counseling, and administrating become intolerably burdensome because we have somehow forgotten why we are doing them. This weariness comes close to what medieval theologians called the deadly sin of sloth or acedia. Simple fatigue says, "I know I should be doing this, but I just can't seem to generate the energy." Acedia says, "Why? What difference does it make?" "Acedia is all of Friday consumed in getting out the Sunday bulletin," says Richard John Neuhaus in Freedom for Ministry. "Acedia is three hours dawdled away on Time magazine, which is then guiltily chalked up to 'study.' Acedia is evenings without number obliterated by television, evenings neither of entertainment nor of education, but of narcotized defense against time and duty. Above all, acedia is apathy, the refusal to engage the pathos of other lives and of God's life with them. A physician friend gave me an article from the Journal of Internal Medicine that dealt with the psychological state conducive to illness called the "giving up, given up complex." It is found in people who lose the reasons for living; who are saying of their existence, "Why? What difference does it make?" Acedia can make bodies vulnerable to disease and pastors terminally tired of the ministry. Hyperactivity Curiously, spiritual fatigue can produce what appears to be the opposite of sloth or acedia: hyperactivity. But in reality, it is just another dimension of the same thirst and sense of "why" that saps us of our ability to do the "what" of ministry. "Hyperactivity and sloth are twin sins," says Neuhaus, and rightly so. The only real difference is the anxious, frenetic shape hyperactivity takes. Too tired to pray, or too busy to pray: both are flip sides of the same coin. Either we stagger through our days exhausted and aimless like people dying of thirst in the desert; or like children lost in the woods, the more lost we feel, the faster we run. Driving is the word that describes the schedules of so many of us who are no longer motivated to do the real work of the ministry. Hyperactivity is to authentic motivation as junk food is to a nourishing diet. It gives us the feeling of satisfaction while starving us to death. In the New Testament it is the Ephesian syndrome described in Revelation 2:1-7. The first love is gone, and now all that is left is the form and the trappings. This may be the malady most preyed upon by the innumerable seminars offered today on the techniques of church leadership. When we forget "why" we become obsessed with "how."
|