Burned By Deep Ministry Hurts

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As we drove last summer toward a hidden lake among the mountains of Northern Colorado there was the beauty of the forest surrounding us. Tall dark green pine trees on both sides of the road clinging to the sides of the mountains. It was a magnificent sight to see until we came into vast expanses of burned pine trees standing up from the ground like toothpicks. The evidence of forest fires from previous years went on for miles. The ground was also littered with fallen trees that had slid down the mountains and hills, making the beauty of the landscape dissipate to a very disturbing sight.

Burned Trees Collage

Trapper’s Lake

A few minutes into our hike I noticed patches of trees that had been saved from the forest fires, but all around them stood the skeletons of the forest. The burned trees stood as monuments of a life that once was vibrant and full of its God-given purpose. New grass had begun to grow around the burned remains of trees, some vines and flowers had grown around them, but the remains looked unbecoming in the landscape of the hidden lake.

I took pictures because in my heart I knew I would write about being burned in the ministry. As much as I hated to see the evidence of the trials of that particular forest, it was beautiful to see the lush grass and wildflowers blooming with insects finding their way around to pollinate the other flowers. Life was returning but the scars stood as evidence of the hurt.

I realize as many of you read this that I am not a seasoned veteran of the ministry and probably  burns and hurts will come to our lives that I do not even wish to think of or imagine. I had a deep ministry hurt occur as I served as a secretary in our church when I was single. It took me many years to forgive the particular person involved, and I had to deal with the roots of bitterness I had in my heart toward them over and over. It does still hurt to think about, but the thoughts do not control me anymore, because the Lord continued to teach me about forgiveness.

Ministry hurts shake you to the core and sometimes leave you lifeless like a burned pine tree. It messes with your mind, it creates doubt in your heart toward people, and it may even leave you with questions about whether God really cares. While I have recovered and new blooms have also come into my life and our current ministry, I still remember what it was like.  I hope this article will give you some good helps on what you can do to help yourself or someone else that has been burned by the ministry.

1. Acknowledge the hurt and talk to God about it.

Each life situation goes across God’s sacred desk before He approves it or allows it. He knows about the hurt you are thinking of now. The people and situations that have caused it and the disappointment and betrayal you may be feeling. Be honest when you speak to God about them, you don’t have to question Him or be angry with Him. In humble acknowledgement you can go to Him as a child goes to His father and tells him the problems, doubts, and fears he has.

The gospel song says it all when it says, “When you don’t feel like praying pray.” You may not feel like it, you may not want to, but you should do it anyway.

2. When your thoughts go a mile a minute in every direction from the temptation to exact vengeance upon someone to utter despair, think of God.

This verse in particular spoke to my heart during one of my hardest trials.

In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul. Psalm 94:19

While others may be against us and the reality of the hurt may set in, we must ALWAYS find comfort in the Lord. All other worldly comforts, gossip, backbiting, drinking alcohol, abusing pain medications, forsaking our immediate family members are not the cure. Our comfort must come from God alone.

3. Allow yourself time to heal from the burns.

The grass in the forest did not begin to grow again in the forest until time had passed after the forest fire. Sometimes after significant ministry problems we expect (and other people expect) that we should bounce back to our original self and be ready to fight the good fight of faith with vigor and resilience. This is not realistic for someone who has been wounded deeply.

Think of Elijah the prophet, this story is very different in many ways from the purpose of this post, but I think the love in which God ministered to him is an example of how He cares for us when are hurt by the ministry.

I Kings 19: 5-8 And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again. And the angel of the Lord came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee. And he arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God.

God ministered to Elijah through the angel. I believe God sends special gifts of blessings in our hurts to help us recuperate and gain our strength again. But it takes some time. We may not be able to take a break from ministry during these times but we should be resting on days where we can and allowing God to minister to our hearts.

4. Take care of your daily personal needs. 

One of the hardest things about deep hurts is that our body can manifest the pain in many ways from anxiety to depression to an unsettled sadness or burning in your chest. Your teeth may itch or you may suddenly burst into tears. Take care of your health, mind, and spirit during these times so that the physical manifestations of your stress will subside.

Eat healthy foods regularly, take naps and get to bed on time, get up and bathe and put on clean clothes. When we are in the initial response from burns and hurts in our lives we sometimes go into shock and even the simplest tasks go undone. When you will get yourself up and ready for the day and carry on with normal activities, it will help you heal faster.

5. Take Care of Your Spiritual Needs

I mentioned earlier that taking care of your thoughts and mind is comforting yourself with God’s blessings.

The spiritual man inside of us when burned needs special attention. We still need to read our Bible, seek out God’s answers, and go to the Balm of Gilead to allow Him to heal our hearts. When He speaks we should respond correctly. The book of Psalms can be especially helpful to read during hard times.

Putting off necessary steps of healing, such as making things right with the person that caused the pain, can be difficult. Disobeying God’s promptings will prolong the hurt. Every situation for every person is different, we must be obedient to what He tells us to do. It may be committing to pray for the people involved, doing something nice for them (even if they don’t deserve it), or making a decision to not load our spouse down with talking about the situation all the time. You will know when God speaks to your heart.

Conclusion

I will never tell you that the burns of ministry are easy, that you should be this or do that by a specific time period. There should be a time of healing and recovery in your life, these times and situations may redefine your life but should not redefine your standing with the Lord. There is a future and a plan He has for us. After we are healed our job is to help others when they are going through their own hurts.

The next article on this topic will be Healing From Deep Ministry Hurts.

This is the Bad Day

I don’t know why some days just are wild and wacky and other days are ho-hum and kind of blah. Today was more than wacky and just plain wild. The Bible says that each day belongs to the Lord and I often sing the familiar verse to the familiar tune:

♪ ♫This is the day, This is the day, that the Lord hath made, that the Lord hath made. I will rejoice, I will rejoice and be glad in it, and be glad in it… ♪ ♫

Tonight I want to sing, “This is a bad day, This is a bad day…”

An Emergency to Remember

But wow, today was just really confusing and worrisome to me as a mother. Dos, our 6 year old, was doing his school work at our kitchen table and with this wiggly bottom that does not usually ever (and I mean ever) stay still, knocked our bench over. He fell to the ground suddenly and began crying very loudly. Most kids like to wail and then they’re fine, I casually waited for him to stop but as he continued with the loud outcry my mothering radar went off and I went to investigate the injury. Boy was it an injury! His two fingers, “tall man” and “ring man,” on his left hand were busted wide open like a squished grape. The bench had fallen on top of his fingers, making them split.

I grabbed a kitchen towel, and began to apply pressure. By then all the other kids began to gravitate toward him to figure out what all the commotion was about. I knew as soon as I saw his fingers that he was going to need stitches. Calling my husband, who was at staff lunch with the other men at church, I was relieved to hear his voice pick up the phone. He immediately made preparations to abandon his lunch date and come to our rescue.

Somehow Dos and I shimmied over to the counter so I could get some Ibuprofen down him, knowing that he would need it in his system if he was going to be getting stitches. We acquired flip flops for him and a jacket, then all loaded up in the van to wait for my husband to arrive. Dos insisted that I go with him, so we buckled up in the front seat. We now have a hospital within 3 minutes from our home, so we hoped we could get him in fast and out before our Lord’s Supper Service tonight.

Husband arrived with a first aid kit at the church and left his lunch behind in the car when he valiantly escorted us to the ER parking lot. Dos was desperately hoping that I could go with him, but with 3 other kids, I just could not bring them in with us. Papa (husband) went with him and was the brave parent. Several times I had cried throughout the ordeal, just because I knew there was nothing I could do for him. So I went home and fed the other kids the lunch I had been preparing when he knocked over the bench. Then, the wait began…

I was just sick to my stomach. Our girls took a nap and thankfully Uno distracted me with the board game “Trouble.” It’s kind of a funny thought that Trouble distracted me from trouble. We prayed and I wondered and waited… and waited… and waited… Little texts here and there from Husband did not make me any more at ease.

Impatience is my un-virtue. I have these inner time clocks and when things are not getting completed by the inner time clock then my wiring starts acting up and stress begins to build. I look at the clock when I know my husband is going to be home and if he’s late I start feeling it and wondering and regularly checking the time. I will wait and wait until finally I break out my phone and call and 9 times out of 10, he’s driving in our neighborhood about to pull into the driveway. My patience just does not wait long enough.

My inner time clock was going crazy today! Dos was in the ER before 1:00 pm and did not get out until 6 pm. 5+ hours for an x-ray and 7 stitches!? I’m so glad I gave him the Ibuprofen before he left the house. I just wish that I had sent him with a snack.

We ran to Subway after leaving the hospital and grabbed some grub, then flew to church and made it around 6:30 pm in time for my husband to change clothes and do lightning speed preparations for our music for the Lord’s Supper service at 7:00 pm. But that’s not all…

The Lord’s Supper Service

I sat down in the church chairs wiped out from the roller coaster of today’s event and tried to keep Tres and Cuatro (our girls) quiet during the entire service. I sat there and just told God, “this is me, today, I don’t know what to think, say, or do.” Thankfully I had taken some time in the prior days to make the soul-searching evaluations of my heart and prepare for the solemn occasion of commemorating the Lord’s death at our service. I just was not able to plug in and feel apart of the service tonight. People were crying because they were whole-heartedly taking in the songs and viewing Christ’s death as a personal responsibility. The only personal responsibility I was feeling was keeping the kids quiet enough for everyone else to be able to focus.

I became the referee between children and the sticker queen with Hello Kitty stickers stuck to my jacket. Try to explain to a preschooler and a toddler why they can’t have a “cracker” and some juice in a cute tiny cup. I failed to bring a small snack again this year, I wonder why!? HA! I have to admit that I felt a little better when another child started crying across the auditorium from us until Cuatro recognized it and loudly said, “Baby!”

A lady in our church talked to me on the phone this morning and just encouraged me not to worry if our girls were a little disruptive in the service tonight, but to take a deep breath and just take it as a thing that the Lord allowed to happen. Her advice helped me tonight to feel some calm inside and just allow the little ones to be their age while training them to be quiet.

A Godly Conclusion

God uses these types of days to bring home the reality that we do not know what a day may bring forth. Our pastor mentions this quote regularly, “If you don’t have something to be thankful for, be thankful for the things you don’t have.” Today I realize that there are parents waiting long hours for their children to come out of major surgery, while I was waiting on 7 stitches. I realize that some people wait for their loved ones to come home, and they never will return because of tragic events happen in their day. My trial is mild in comparison to so many long term diseases or even the long term waiting on a Prodigal child to return home. I am thankful for a husband that is dedicated to love and care for our family not just in the crises, but daily. There is plenty to be thankful for even on a day like today.

Maybe the lessons I taught my children were to care for an injury, to pray over and over even within a day over the needs of a loved one. Maybe in time they will learn that their faithfulness is important to God because we all have church days where we are present but we just cannot be plugged in for some reason. I do not know what timing and reasons there were for this incident for today. Will it make me stronger for another situation in the future? Only God knows everything I can learn from a day like today, and I pray my heart is open to Him teaching me He is our very  present help in trouble.

Psalm 46:1 God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

God is good to help us realize that each day belongs to Him and we truly can sing the song, “This is the Day,” with a firm belief that this day, no matter how it is, is His day for His purposes in our life.

Hurting From a Distance

A gush of pain pours out from my heart every moment I think of the hurt.

The remorse I feel for the very situation is something I regret. To feel so depleted from inner energy and speechless from an inability to know how to comfort the pain of the one I love that is hurting.

This pain is not of mine own doing. Another has hurt not just someone that I love, but the whole family. Their hearts are broken more deeply than my own. Their tears have fallen and they now have questions about the future. What will they do now? Where will they go? How will they go on living with the ache in their hearts and stomachs from their great loss? Will they ever love again?

This is the heartache of our dear friends as they have offered a resignation to their church. They loved and served with many sacrifices and difficulties. They never pretended to be perfect people, but their hearts were open to helping, loving, and giving but often they were rejected. The toil at times was unbearable, like the tasks many of us face.

The hurt I hold in my heart feels so useless. It is the same hurt I have felt while carrying a healthy child in my womb and hearing of another woman having a miscarriage. My heart has cried for her and asked many questions of why and borne a burden of guilt for having been able to carry all of our children to term. Our ministry, although we have no guarantees, is blessed at this time. We face struggles, but they seem so minor in direct comparison of our friends’ great loss.

They are not the only to lose, their church loses in a multiplicity of ways…but that is its own separate discussion.

I do not know, more than just mere words and prayer how to comfort those I love from a distance. I want to rescue and help them. See their faces, hug their necks, place a hand upon their shoulders and reassure them of God’s promises. I don’t want to hear their voice of hurt on the phone and wonder how much of a front they are putting on to make me feel better.

These were friends that appeared in our lives as we were struggling in our marriage with two little boys, trying to get my husband through Bible college so we could follow God’s will. We were probably a sad excuse of anything back then. Their friendship brought us a sense of hope and family when we had been so far from our own. We were together for Thanksgiving, Easter, and many other celebrations of family events with a dash of everything else in between.

God gave them a beautiful home, about 5 miles away from our apartment. They would pick up the boys and I on their way to church on Wednesday nights, load up the carseats, we would hop in and buckle up and be off to the mid-week service. It was a good time of fellowship and burden sharing. I fell in love with their girls and her girls loved our boys. She and I were true friends.

Then we were called to our current ministry, they helped us load our moving truck and stay the night in their home before we set out on the new adventure of ministry. It was hard to say good-bye to them. It was not long afterward God impressed them to sell that beautiful home, and as my friend liked to say it, she believed they lived there because God wanted them near us. It boggles my mind in some ways that God would care so much for us both to have provided such a blessing of having nearby friends. Would we have made it through without them?

Some time later our friends finished their time at Bible college themselves, they are a bit older than us, but finished in record time. They went straight to the ministry where they are now… we have been able to see them at church camps, as well as in my husband’s home church during a holiday, while they were also there visiting their family. We were also able to visit them on one occasion and see the work God had given them firsthand.

I hurt here because they hurt there. It’s like watching a child falling in slow motion and being too far away to be able to rescue the child and getting there in time to pick them up off the ground. They are not my children, they are God’s and I know He loves them more than I do and will care for them better than I can. But even knowing that, I feel it is hardest at times to hurt with someone from a distance. My inability to fix or help the hurting person makes me feel like my hands are tied and my love is somehow meaningless.

So, when you are hurting in ministry and you have spilled your heart out to a fellow ministry friend that is across the miles, and you feel lonely…
know they might be grieving and hurting with you from a distance.

They may wish to bind your wounds, set you upon their beast, and take you to the inn like the Good Samaritan did.

They may be praying earnestly for your broken heart and wishing they could bear some of the pain with you.

They may be feeling grossly inadequate since words are their only means of comforting you.

If they had the money they might drive or fly just to see you and hug you and listen to your heart.

They may have to be brave enough to know that just wishing isn’t enough and have the faith to put you in God’s hands where you are already placed, and leave you there because He loves you more than they do.

They may have questions too about the reasons why.

Love those friends that hurt with you. You may have few of them but they must be loyal and kind people to which God has given you to aid you on your journey of following His will.

If you hurt like I do from a distance to those you love, let them know! Declare your love and use God’s Word to encourage them. And if necessary, make a sacrifice, to assure them that you care. It just may be what gives them enough strength to make it to the next day.