I sat with our son and daughter-in-law as we watched their historic home burn to the ground this past spring. We all felt the overwhelm and heartbreak of sitting on the literal ash heap of their burned-out house.
A home can burn down when you least expect it, and hope can be just as fragile. What hope of yours has burned to the ground? What heap of ash in your life are you sitting on right now? What plan did you have that is now … soot? A ministry calling? A family relationship, a close friendship, a hurting marriage? A hope for children, a hope for one of your children? A vision and prayer for your church family?
The pain of all these burned-out hopes can spread into burnout in your life in general where you least imagine it. Where in your story are you painfully burned out and ready to quit? Wherever that is, you are not alone.
All of us who have ever sighed with weary discouragement are in the company of the prophet Jeremiah, who actually cursed the day of his own birth (Jer. 20:14); of Job, who lamented ever being born (Job 3); of the author of Psalm 42, who vulnerably confesses that his soul is cast down and disquieted within him; of Paul, who frankly speaks of being “perplexed … wretched … and [despairing] even of life” (2 Cor. 1:8). And of that great prayer warrior who became greatly discouraged, “Elijah, [who] was as human as we are” (James 5:17).
Elijah strikingly knew about fire coming straight down from heaven—and about being burned out. And he turns out to be more than a prophet with an informative word for us. His very life experience is a prophecy that ultimately instructs, invites and ushers us into the intimacy of union with God—a prescription of sorts, that deeply comforts and raises us up from our ash heap of incinerated hopes and plans.
Elijah had just prayed to the very real God of the cosmos who hears our cries, begging him to send down fire and ignite an altar on Mount Carmel, defy Ahab and Jezebel and all their prophets, turn the people around, and definitively prove his very certain care, his very real closeness, his very reliable character—in striking contrast to the impotence of the imaginary Baal gods.
God personally hears.
And God powerfully answers.
And the altar ignites.
Elijah’s expectations of renewal and revival soar to the heights.
And an infuriated Queen Jezebel sets Elijah in her sights.
Queen Jezebel rages over the embarrassing defeat of her do-nothing prophets, of the entirely not-real Baals, to the extent that she explodes in a vow to kill Elijah. And he, who has just risked his life and witnessed fire fall from heaven above, now runs for his life and falls down at a juniper tree in the wilderness, utterly burned out, wanting out of his life. He even goes so far as to pray that he might die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he says. “Take my life” (1 Kings 19:4).
Whenever you powerfully pour out spiritually, you’re vulnerable to being completely burned out physically.
Yet, when you’ve had it, God still has you.
And when you want God to come and take your life, God comes and takes your hand.
“All at once an angel touched him and said, ‘Get up and eat.’ He, Elijah, looked around, and there by his head was some bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again” (1 Kings 19:5–6).
There may be few scenes in all the Old Testament that comfort souls more than this.
God doesn’t just reach out and place all the blazing stars in the heavens—he reaches out and touches all of us who are exhausted and burned out. Wherever we’ve been touched by tragedy, by disappointment, by heartache, an angel of the Lord comes and touches us. Wherever we say, “I want to give up and die,” God says, “Get up and eat.”
And the astonishing comfort is God never, ever makes us make the meal we need to sustain our own souls.
Throughout Scripture, time and time again, God comforts with the assurance that he will bring the comfort food. God comes and rains down the manna, God sends the ravens with the food, Jesus multiplies all the little loaves and fishes, Jesus comes as the bread, Jesus offers himself as the living water, Jesus shows up and Jesus cooks breakfast on the beach—the bread and the fish—right there over the fire, to sustain and strengthen brokenhearted Peter.
Where you are burned out, God starts a fire and God makes you a meal.
When you are tired, you don’t have to make the meal. Jesus makes the meal, Jesus offers you the meal, Jesus is the meal.
Where you are burned out, and you’re just desperately craving some real comfort, Jesus breaks himself into a feast for you, so that you can savor and taste and see that the Lord is good, and your heart can burn with hope within you again.
When Elijah flings himself under that juniper tree, God doesn’t judge or condemn him from some distant throne room—God comes and intimately attends to him and brings to his broken heart real comfort food: himself.
When hope eludes us, and the dark deludes us, and we feel at the end of ourselves, it’s a relief to live in the reality that God never stops attending to us.
This is the most comforting reality.
God doesn’t distantly wave some wand for us. God personally comes and intimately attends to us.
God tenderly attends: He doesn’t browbeat or tongue-lash; he gently touches.
God tenderly attends: He doesn’t school and rebuke; he gives sleep and rest.
God tenderly attends: He doesn’t tell the tired to get up and make some food to keep on going. God makes himself into the food for you.
Time and again, especially when we’re at the end of ourselves and in situations that feel like we’re at the end of hope’s road, God doesn’t give us cerebral explanations of our situations; he comes and gives us personal encounters … with himself.
Elijah had run to that juniper tree at the end of the road of ministry, saying he had had enough, begging God to just end it all. Significantly, the Hebrew name for a juniper is rethem, coming from the root word ratham, which means “to bind, to tie, to attach.” The exact place Elijah’s run away to, flinging himself under that rethem tree, is the very place that will bind him to God, attach him to God, tie his heart to God.
That place where you feel abandoned by everyone else is exactly where God is attaching and binding you to himself.
That rethem tree of burnout and heartache that you find yourself under, that’s exactly where God himself is binding up your heartbreak. And there at your rethem tree, God’s binding your heart to his whole, healing heart, to give you his life so you can live your life in the whole life of God.
Whatever we’re facing, we are not alone in the radically changing times we live in, where every day can feel like the world is on fire in some disorienting, discouraging way.
In the midst of troubled times, with Vandals charging civilization, Boethius, a revered Roman senator, mathematician and philosopher, wrote a great work that explored what true happiness is in a terrible world, The Consolation of Philosophy.
Writing from a jail cell, as the days ticked down toward his own execution, Boethius wasn’t very much unlike despairing Elijah begging for God to take his life. The philosopher bemoans that death “refuses to close my weeping eyes.”
Where is comfort in the midst of the heartache? Where is hope and consolation in the midst of the crisis?
While Boethius points out how the Stoics suggested hope and comfort were found in calmly, resolutely and with determination simply accepting the spin of Fortune’s wheel, Boethius leaned toward a better, more deeply consoling way, a soul-caring way, that can be experienced only as we simply return to the still center of God as the steadying axis of our world, the One turning all the other concentric circles.
“We are creatures of the peripheries, invited to come closer to the center,” he writes. “We have the capacity, not only in thought but through the pursuit of virtue, to ‘seek the center of things.’”
That’s what Boethius said: Seek the center of things.
Beothius’ beckoning invitation to abandon the peripheries and turn to seek and live in the still center is echoed in Dorothy L. Sayers’ sonnet in the novel Gaudy Night: “We have come, last and best / From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled / To that still centre where the spinning world / Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.”
The dizzying circles hurl us to our juniper tree, and God attends to us and attaches to us as our certain, still center of rest.
When Elijah slumped down in despair, had he somehow centered himself in his story—and jostled God to the circumference? Had the headlining rage of Jezebel gotten into his head, and the noise of her narcissism and his own charged reactivity somehow taken center stage?
Like Elijah, has much discouragement and weariness from living at the center with God somehow evicted him to our periphery, ousted him to the circumference of our days?
Have we let any circumstances in our life slowly begin to move God to the circumference of our life?
When God isn’t our center, the crushing weight of self is centered in our story.
When God lives on our periphery, pain becomes our focus.
Whenever God is dismissed to our circumference, that’s when our lives destabilize and careen.
When God is your center, whatever your circumstances, your center always holds. Because Abba Father never stops attending to and holding you.
Throughout the whirl and dizzying circles of our days, what has the steadying center of our attention? Breaking news? Or the only good news that can actually repair?
What is centered in our focus every day? Our wounds and their wrongs? Or stopping at times throughout the day for communion and intimate prayer with the Wounded Healer himself? Because it’s by his stripes we are healed, and it’s only his upside-down cruciform way that transforms, covers all wrongs, and is making all things right.
What is the center in our spinning universe? Striving, day after day, to find that elusive way to a life of ease … or having a rhythm of being still and living in the Way himself who is making even us into the sanctified and beautiful cruciform, especially when life is hard?
Tenderly, “the angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, ‘Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.’ So he got up and ate and drank. Strengthened by that food, he traveled 40 days and 40 nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God” (1 Kings 19:7–8).
When you’ve been touched by too much heartbreak, God will come and touch you not once but twice, and he will nourish you with himself so you can miraculously be strengthened to keep on going.
God knows your journey is too much—which is your complete relief and also your catalyst to depend on him much, rely on him much, attach to him much. Because your journey is too much for you, the invitation is to fully rest and fully open yourself up to him and let him love you much.
And he will invite you again and again to get up and feast on him, and eat his Book, and savor the bread who is your Beloved, and taste and see that the Lord is good and he is love, and the answer to the problem of heartbreak and evil and disappointment and burnout isn’t primarily philosophical or theological, but the answer is primarily in letting him love us in ways that are unconditional.
There are not so much neat bows of answers in this life as much as there is letting the loving affection of God wrap around us here in the heartaches.
Ultimately, Elijah’s a fireball of a prophecy that is perhaps a prescription for our burnout:
• Be open to letting God deeply touch you and restore you.
• Let angels minister to you unaware, and with daily, deep awareness.
• Take real time every day to rest in the God who doesn’t sleep or slumber. If you don’t take time to be still with God every day, time will take you for a whirling ride and life’s still going to go on hurting.
• The nourishment you need for your deep heartaches is in deep attachment with your God.
• Let God make your meal—and let God be your meal.
Neediness is all you need to experience the life you deeply want. Center daily in God’s attending presence, and let everything else find its place on the circumference.
Your journey is too much for you—so how much will you open to the Spirit, to the Way himself, and let him live his life through you?
When you let yourself be loved unconditionally by your centering God, you ultimately cannot be defeated or destabilized by any of the conditions of this dizzying world.
In the end, God not only chose not to grant Elijah’s request to end his life, he chose for Elijah to be one of the few men in history never to die. Though Elijah had had enough, and was at the end of himself, God intimately sustained him with much more for himself so he could go miraculously far and straight into the presence of God (1 Kings 19:8–18).
Burnout is not the end of our story, but can be the very kindling in the hearth of our hearts as we open to him moving right in and making our hearts his home, as we center and attach to the God who intimately attends to our needs for comfort and rest, as he tenderly stokes our hearts’ affections and keeps those inner fires burning, as he raises us and our hopes up again.
