09. When You're Burned Out with Dai Hankey
Today Dai Hankey is bringing some gospel grace to our weary souls. If you don’t know him, Dai is a church planter in Cardiff, Wales, and the founder of Red Community, a Christian charity that fights human trafficking. He is the author of Hopeward: Gospel Grace for Weary Souls. Speaking from a personal experience of burnout, Dai will come alongside those of us who feel weary to explore what it looks like to lean on Jesus and to enjoy his rest. We pray this episode encourages you to find your hope and rest in Christ.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
What is your personal experience with burnout and weariness in ministry?
Why do you think so many of us feel weary and burned out?
What is the context of Matthew 11:28-30, and who is the invitation for? What does Jesus offer those of us who are heavy-laden?
How can we draw near to his throne of grace? What happens when we do?
How does God use our weaknesses to display his power and strength?
What does it mean to abide in Christ?
How does Jesus satisfy our hunger and replenish our thirsty souls? How does the cross of Christ free us from our burdens and offer us hope?
How does God’s Word offer essential nourishment for weak and weary souls as they seek to press on hopeward?
How do the Spirit and the saints help us move forward?
What brings you rest when you feel weary?
NOTES & QUOTES
“I have a great deal of weakness, a great deal of personal crud and clutter that I don't like thinking about and I don't like facing up to. But it's actually in those moments where we can own that and confess that God almost seems to say, ‘Great, now I've got some grace you can receive.’ Because it's those who are in need of grace and mercy that approach the throne with humility.”
“Too many of us try to strut and swagger our way through the Christian life thinking, ‘Look at this impressive thing I've done. I'm crushing it right now.’ And I think that doesn't really make us useful to God. And I don't think it's sustainable. I think you can almost see the kindness of God sometimes in crushing us and stopping us to the point where we have to just recognize we need a Savior, we need help, we need a deliverer, we need the Lord to be the one that’s in control.”
“A lot of us like the idea about the Lord being the Savior, but we want to be the Lord. We want to be the ones that are in control, the ones that call the shots. And when all that gets stripped away and you're confronted with your own mortality and weakness, you're not a very good Lord in that moment. And essentially he can be re-throned in your life as the One who is strong and who is gracious and who is able to sustain you.”
“The humble posture of receiving grace needs to be the hallmark of Christian life, not just Christian conversion.”
“I think God will use whatever means it takes to humble us to the point where we allow him to be God in our lives, not just to the point where we can cope with the really bad times until we're the ones that are in control again.”
“I think we're encouraged to go get it, to be all that you can be, to be the best version of you and to change the world—even to change the world in Jesus' name. It's almost like the ‘In Jesus' name’ bit gets tagged on the end, but us being world changers is the real focus. And I just think it's bonkers. It just doesn't chime with biblical Christianity at all.”
“Jesus is the hero of the biblical story, and he should be the hero of our story. But so often we want to live this kind of micro-Hollywood story where we're actually the hero, and we're the ones who get the credit for anything good that comes out of our lives. And it's just not biblical Christianity.”
“God sometimes just says ‘No, you actually need that thorn more than you realize, because without the thorn you're in control and you're the lord of your own life. But with the thorn, it presses you into me and that's a much better place to be if you wanna live a fruitful Christian life.’”
Lauren: “What is your thorn?
The pain that pricks your side?
The wound in your flesh that torments you?
The weakness you plead for the Lord to remove?
What is it that presses you low?
Is it a pull of the flesh, a recurring sin?
prolonged grief that renders you weak?
A loss that makes you continually weary?
a years-long struggle that cripples you?
Our thorns may vary;
They’re borne in different ways.
Oft we complain of them,
call them distractions,
obstacles to a comfortable life
—hindrances, even, to our kingdom work.
We ask the Lord to remove them,
Balking when they remain,
Grumbling when they leave us continually frail.
Yet Paul said his thorn boasted of Christ’s strength,
His very weakness lifting high the Lord’s sufficiency.
Though he beseeched for their removal,
He praised still when they remained,
Perhaps knowing something we are slow to know,
About the true meaning of grace, of weakness, of strength.
Christ himself wore his thorns as a crown,
A crown made as a mockery of his claimed authority,
Yet resting on the brow of the divine One.
Who though he beseeched for their removal,
Endured as they remained, obedient unto death,
Bearing thorns and death that we might only know their shadow.
Maybe it’s true then, that our thorns—
Those annoyances and pains,
Those wounds that prick,
Perhaps they are a gift…
Maybe our thorns press us ever more
toward the very fruit we long to cultivate:
Humility, patience, faith, trust, dependence.
Maybe our thorns are blessings
that lead us ever more into the arms of the One
Who is sufficient to turn all things for our good,
All things for his glory.
Maybe these thorns remain still,
Keeping us weak,
Keeping us low,
Keeping us close
to the One whose grace is strong.”
“We all have places that we go, but none of it satisfies. None of it is going to give us that relief and sustenance that we really need. It's not just because the Bible describes itself as the bread—’Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’—but it actually is. It actually does spiritually nourish us in ways that nothing else and no one else can.”
“I've been a Christian for 31 years and it’s just littered with moments where God's Word has been just that light that just shattered the darkness. It's been that promise which got me through.”
“You’ve just got to make sure that you're putting yourself in a place where the Word can do that. You know, by not swerving to go to church on Sundays, even if you don't feel like going to church, by allowing your friends to send you text messages with a Scripture and allowing yourself to read those, even if you don't feel like reading it, and by sitting there with the Bible open, even if it feels like it's just words on a page, just trusting that the Holy Spirit could grab something and apply it to you. It's just really important.”
“What Christ in his mercy and his cross does is he says, ‘It's finished.’ You haven't got to strive to prove anything anymore. You haven't got to strive to be good enough for God anymore. You haven't got to strive to prove to God that you're something that you're not anymore. He knows exactly who you are. Still, he loved you enough to come for you in the person of Christ.”
“The cross says that you're loved and you're forgiven and there's nothing left to prove. And the empty grave says that it's not over. There's hope.”
“The Word is the bread because Christ is the bread. And because the Word takes us to Jesus, we see in Jesus the fulfillment of every promise. All promises of God are yes and amen in Christ. And all these amazing promises of deliverance and salvation and much-needed hope, that's all found in Christ.”
“When God heals and restores us we can then be in a better position to be gracious, empathetic, and fruitful in giving grace to others.”
“We can't just write off the church because Jesus didn't.”
Lauren: “We know that for some of you listening right now, Dai’s words might hit close to home. As someone who grew up in the church and has spent most of the last decade on staff at a church or intimately involved in serving the church in various ways, I—unfortunately—have experienced my fair share of what you would call “church hurt.” And, friends, it is gut-wrenching. It’s deeply painful. And for anyone who has experienced hurt at the hands of the church—whether that has been wounds from other members, belittling from church leaders, injustice, manipulation, or outright spiritual abuse—I want you to hear that we are so sorry for that. To invest in a place that you thought was safe, people that you thought were your people, who were your family… for the church to suddenly become an unsafe or hurtful place... I know (personally) that that is such a horrible, hard, isolating, heartbreaking thing. If that’s you, my prayer for you is that you can see God’s heart toward you, no matter what your experience is. Abuse, injustice, manipulation. These things are deeply upsetting to the heart of God. He does not want his church to be defined by these things. I know it can be so hard to separate the actions of members of a church from the God they profess…but in some instances (and likely with a lot of help), you might need to work really hard to see the character of God as separate from the hurt you’ve experienced from the church. Because God’s heart toward you is not cruel, manipulative, or abusive. His heart toward you is only good and only kind (it’s all he can be). At the end of the day, even after the various hurts I have experienced from the church, I still very much love the church. And you know what? At least for me, the place where I was hurt has turned out to be the very place where I have found the deepest healing from that hurt. It has been a gift and a mercy to me after various painful experiences to run back to the church (albiet sometimes this has meant going to a different church body) and find safety, community and love there. And I hope for you too that you can experience the beauty, safety, and healing of God’s church.”
“I'm not God's gift to this world, Jesus is. I have a great deal of weakness, a great deal of personal crud and clutter that I don't like thinking about and I don't like facing up to. But it’s in those moments where we can own that and confess that, that God almost seems to say, ‘great, now I've got some grace you can receive,’ because it's those who are in need of grace and mercy that approach the throne with humility.”
SCRIPTURE
John 15:5
Matthew 11:28-30
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
What is your personal experience with burnout and weariness?
What comfort do you draw from Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:28-30?
Are there ways that you have seen God use your weaknesses to display his power and strength?
Where in God’s Word have you found nourishment when you feel weak and weary? Consider memorizing this passage this week.
What might you do or implement in light of what you learned in this week’s episode?
IMPORTANT NOTE
Journeywomen interviews are intended to serve as a springboard for continued study in the context of your local church. While we carefully select guests each week, interviews do not imply Journeywomen's endorsement of all writings and positions of the interviewee or any other resources mentioned.
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