READING YOUR GAUGES

For almost all of the eigh­teen years I have served in ministry, I have mon­i­tored myself closely in two areas, con­tin­u­ally check­ing two gauges on the dash­board of my life. Until recently, I thought that was enough.

First, I kept an eye on the spir­i­tual gauge, ask­ing myself, How am I doing spir­i­tu­ally? Apart from Christ I can do noth­ing. I know that. I don’t want my life’s efforts to be burned up because they were done merely through human effort, clever tac­tics, or gim­mickry. I am gripped by the fact that I must oper­ate in the power of the Holy Spirit.

To keep my spir­i­tual gauge where it needs to be, I have com­mit­ted myself to the spir­i­tual dis­ci­plines: jour­nal­ing, fasting, solitude, sac­ri­fice, study, and oth­ers. Like many Chris­tians before me, I have dis­cov­ered that these dis­ci­plines clar­ify spir­i­tual issues and pump a high-​​octane fuel, pro­vid­ing inten­sity and strength for ministry.

Even though the pace of min­istry has dra­mat­i­cally quick­ened in the past few years, I hon­estly don’t think I often mis­read my spir­i­tual gauges. Look­ing at my life’s dash­board, I can tell when I am spir­i­tu­ally half full, three-​​quarters full, or, some­times, full.

When I’m full spir­i­tu­ally, I can look at my life and hon­estly say I love Jesus Christ and I’m attend­ing to my spir­i­tual dis­ci­plines and keep­ing myself open to the lead­ing of Christ. When I’m spir­i­tu­ally full, I don’t need to apol­o­gize for my motives. I can truly say: “I’m not in min­istry because it gives me strokes. I’m excited about the fruit being borne through the min­istry of Wil­low Creek.”

Sec­ond, I have mon­i­tored the phys­i­cal gauge—How am I doing phys­i­cally? I know that if I push my body too hard, over time I will expe­ri­ence a phys­i­cal break­down or psy­cho­so­matic com­pli­ca­tions asso­ci­ated with high stress.

If I don’t exer­cise, eat prop­erly, and rest, I will offer the Lord only about two-​​thirds of the energy I have the poten­tial of giv­ing. The Holy Spirit tugs at me to be wholly available—mind, soul, and body—for the work to which he has called me. Con­se­quently, I have com­mit­ted myself to the phys­i­cal dis­ci­plines of run­ning and weight lift­ing. I closely watch what I eat. And I receive reg­u­lar med­ical check-​​ups.

The Near Crash

Since these spir­i­tual and phys­i­cal gauges—the only two on my dashboard—have con­sis­tently sig­naled “go,” I have pushed myself as hard and fast as pos­si­ble. But recently a dif­fer­ent part of my engine began to misfire.

While prepar­ing for a par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult series of sermons, the mes­sage that week wouldn’t come together. No mat­ter how hard I tried, no ideas seemed worth say­ing. Sud­denly I found myself sob­bing with my head on my desk.

I’ve always been more ana­lytic than emo­tional, so when I stopped cry­ing, I said to myself, “I don’t think that was nat­ural.” Peo­ple who know my ratio­nal bent laugh when I tell them that. Indi­vid­u­als more aware of their feel­ings might have known what was wrong, but I didn’t.

All I knew was, Something’s not right with me, and I don’t even have time now to think about it. I’ll have to jour­nal about this tomor­row. I forced my thoughts back to the ser­mon and man­aged to put some­thing together for the ser­vice. But the next morn­ing as I wrote in my jour­nal I considered, Am I falling apart in some area spir­i­tu­ally? My gauges said no. My prac­tice of the dis­ci­plines seemed reg­u­lar, and I didn’t sense a spir­i­tual malaise. Phys­i­cally, am I weak or tired? No, I felt fit.

I con­cluded that maybe this was my mid-​​life cri­sis, a phase I would sim­ply have to endure. But four or five sim­i­lar inci­dents in the next few weeks con­tin­ued sig­nal­ing that my anx­i­ety and frus­tra­tion could not be ignored.

Then I noticed I was feel­ing vulnerable—extremely temptable—in areas where I hadn’t felt vul­ner­a­ble for a long time. And the idea of con­tin­u­ing on in min­istry seemed noth­ing but a tremen­dous bur­den. Where had the joy gone? I couldn’t bear the thought of twenty more years of this.

Maybe God is call­ing me to a dif­fer­ent kind of work, I thought. Maybe he’s get­ting my atten­tion by these break­downs in order to lead me to a dif­fer­ent min­istry. Maybe I should start another church or go back into a career in the marketplace.

At that time, the church was decid­ing whether to take on a major build­ing expan­sion, which inten­si­fied my feel­ings. I knew that if we moved ahead, it would be uncon­scionable for me to leave the senior pas­torate until the expan­sion was com­plete. Yet when I looked hon­estly at whether I wanted to sign up for another three or four years, the answer scared me. It was a big fat no.

You don’t feel like it any­more? I asked myself in disbelief. You want to bail out? What is hap­pen­ing to you? Maybe I did need a change of call­ing.
What­ever it was, I was astounded that I could be com­ing apart, because I put so much stock in the spir­i­tual and phys­i­cal gauges, and nei­ther of them was indi­cat­ing any problem.

After a Christ­mas vaca­tion that didn’t change my feel­ings, I began to seri­ously inspect my life. After talk­ing with some respected peo­ple, I learned that I had over­looked an impor­tant gauge. The spir­i­tual and phys­i­cal aspects of life were impor­tant, but I had failed to con­sider another area essen­tial to healthy ministry—emotional strength.

I was so emo­tion­ally depleted I couldn’t even dis­cern the activ­ity or the call of God on my life. I needed a third gauge on the dash­board of my life.
Through­out a given week of min­istry, I slowly began to real­ize, cer­tain activ­i­ties drain my emo­tional reser­voir. I now call these expe­ri­ences IMA’s—Intensive Min­istry Activities.

An IMA may be a con­fronta­tion, an intense coun­sel­ing ses­sion, an exhaust­ing teach­ing ses­sion, or a board meet­ing about sig­nif­i­cant finan­cial deci­sions. Prepar­ing and deliv­er­ing a mes­sage on a sen­si­tive topic, which requires exten­sive research and thought, for instance, wears me down.

An IMA may be a con­fronta­tion, an intense coun­sel­ing ses­sion, an exhaust­ing teach­ing ses­sion, or a board meet­ing about sig­nif­i­cant finan­cial deci­sions. Prepar­ing and deliv­er­ing a mes­sage on a sen­si­tive topic, which requires exten­sive research and thought, for instance, wears me down.

The com­mon denom­i­na­tor of these activ­i­ties is that they sap you, even in only a few hours. Every leader con­stantly takes on IMA’s. I didn’t realize, however, that I could gauge the degree of their impact on me. As a result, I was obliv­i­ous to the intense drain I was experiencing.

For exam­ple, many times while dri­ving home from church, I would feel thin in my spirit. Sens­ing some­thing wrong, I would exam­ine my two trusted gauges.

In the spir­i­tual area, I’d scru­ti­nize myself: Did you give out the Word of God as best you knew how? Did you pray? Did you fast? Did you pre­pare? Were you accu­rate? Did the elders affirm the message?

If that gauge read nor­mal, I would pro­ceed to the phys­i­cal area: Have you kept to your diet? Yes. Have you been work­ing out? Yes. I must be okay. Buck up, Bill. But some­thing was wrong. I needed that third gauge—an emo­tional monitor—to deter­mine my min­istry fit­ness.
Often we attribute our dis­cour­age­ment to spir­i­tual weakness. We berate our­selves: “I’m a bad Chris­t­ian,” or “I’m a lousy disciple.”

And some­times our prob­lem does sig­nal that we are not rightly con­nected to Christ. Yet some prob­lems in min­istry stem not from spir­i­tual lapses but from emo­tional emptiness.

Read­ing the Emo­tional Gauge

I have now com­mit­ted myself to installing an emo­tional gauge in the cen­ter of my dash­board and learn­ing how to read it. I take respon­si­bil­ity to man­age the emo­tional reser­voir in my life.

When my cri­sis hit, I didn’t real­ize my reser­voir was depleted until I (1) began to feel vul­ner­a­ble morally, (2) found myself get­ting short and testy with peo­ple, and (3) felt a desire to get out of God’s work. Sud­denly I knew the tank was nearly dry.

Now my goal is to mon­i­tor my emo­tional resources so I don’t reach that point. What sig­nals do I look for? If I drive away from a min­istry activ­ity and say, “It would be fine if I never did that again,” that’s a warn­ing sig­nal. Some­thing is wrong when I look at peo­ple as inter­rup­tions or see min­istry as a chore.

Another indi­ca­tor: on the way home, do I con­sciously hope Lynne isn’t hav­ing a prob­lem and my kids don’t want any­thing from me? That’s a sign I don’t have enough left to give. When I hope that the pre­cious peo­ple in my life can exist with­out me, that’s a sign of real trouble.

A third check for me is how I approach the spir­i­tual dis­ci­plines. I jour­nal and write my prayers. For months I found myself say­ing, day after day, “I don’t have the energy to do this.” I jour­naled any­way, but more mechan­i­cally than authen­ti­cally. I dis­like myself when my Chris­tian­ity is on autopilot.

Each per­son has to find the warn­ing sig­nals for his or her own life. But after an intense min­istry activ­ity, it helps to ask some ques­tions of your­self: Am I out of gas emo­tion­ally? Can I not stand the thought of relat­ing to peo­ple right now? Do I feel the urge to take a long walk with no des­ti­na­tion in mind? Am l feel­ing the need to go home, put on music, and let the Lord recharge my emotional batteries?

Recharg­ing the Emo­tional Reserves

My next dis­cov­ery was humil­i­at­ing. I found that when my emo­tional fuel was low, I couldn’t do an Indy pit stop and get a fast refill. Replen­ish­ing emo­tional strength takes time—usually more time than it took to drain.

The best anal­ogy I can offer is a car bat­tery. If you sit in a park­ing lot and run all your car’s accessories—radio, headlights, heater, horn, rear defog­ger, power windows—you can prob­a­bly sap that bat­tery in about ten min­utes. After that mas­sive drain, sup­pose you then take the bat­tery to a ser­vice sta­tion and say, “I’d like this bat­tery charged. I’ll be back to pick it up in ten minutes.”

What would they tell you? “No, we’re going to put the bat­teryvon our overnight charger. It’s going to take seven or eight hours to bring it all the way back up.” It has to be recharged slowly or else the bat­tery will be damaged. A slow, con­sis­tent charge is the best way to bring a bat­tery back to full power. Like­wise, to prop­erly recu­per­ate from an emo­tion­ally drain­ing activ­ity takes time.

When I first learned I couldn’t get a quick emo­tional recharge, I shared my frus­tra­tion about that with another pas­tor friend. He said, “Bill, you have found a rule you’re not an excep­tion to. You can fast and study the Scrip­tures and lift weights and do what­ever you want, but there’s no short­cut to rebuild­ing your­self emo­tion­ally. A mas­sive drain requires a slow and steady recharge.”

That dis­cour­aged me. I looked at my aver­age week, and almost every day had an intense min­istry activity—preparing a mes­sage, deliv­er­ing a mes­sage, meet­ing with elders, or mak­ing some tough deci­sion. I would find lit­tle snatches of refresh­ment dur­ing the week, but I fin­ished most weeks with an emo­tional deficit. Then my fam­ily wanted me to have some fun and excit­ing things planned for them, but I was totally depleted. I’m going to over­load the cir­cuitry, I said to myself. One day I’m going to find myself in the prover­bial fetal position.

It has been hum­bling to take an accu­rate, hon­est read­ing of my emo­tional gauges. When I see my emo­tional gauge is read­ing low, I take time to recharge. Some peo­ple recharge by run­ning, oth­ers by tak­ing a bath, oth­ers by read­ing, oth­ers by lis­ten­ing to music. Usu­ally it means doing some­thing totally unre­lated to ministry—golfing, motorcycling, wood­carv­ing. The impor­tant thing is to build a min­istry sched­ule that allows ade­quate time for emo­tional recharging.

Return­ing to Your Gift Areas

I’ve learned a sec­ond thing about main­tain­ing emo­tional resources for min­istry. The use of your major spir­i­tual gift breathes life back into you. When you have iden­ti­fied your spir­i­tual gifts and use them under the direc­tion of Jesus Christ, you make a dif­fer­ence. You feel the affir­ma­tion of God, and many times you feel more ener­gized after ser­vice than before.

I think of when Jesus had that impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion with the woman at the well. The Twelve came back from buy­ing food and said: “Jesus, you must be fam­ished. We had lunch, and you’ve just worked through your lunch hour.” Jesus responded: “I’ve had a meal. I had food you’re not aware of. I was used by my Father to con­nect with a woman who was in trou­ble.” Jesus found that doing what the Father had called him to do was utterly fulfilling.

Con­versely, serv­ing out­side your gift area tends to drain you. If I were asked to sing or assist with account­ing, it would be a long hike uphill. I wouldn’t feel the affir­ma­tion of the Spirit, because I wouldn’t be serv­ing as I have been gifted and called to serve. This is why many peo­ple bail out of var­i­ous types of Chris­t­ian ser­vice: they aren’t in the right yoke.

The prin­ci­ple is self-​​evident, but unwit­tingly I had allowed myself to be pulled away from using my strongest gifts.

About the time Wil­low Creek was founded, I con­ducted an hon­est analy­sis of my spir­i­tual gifts. My top gift was lead­er­ship. My sec­ond gift was evan­ge­lism. Down the list were teach­ing and administration.

I imme­di­ately asked two peo­ple with well-​​developed teach­ing gifts to be pri­mary teach­ers for the new con­gre­ga­tion. God had given me a teach­ing gift, but it was far enough down the list that I had to work very hard at teaching—harder than a gifted teacher does.

Both peo­ple declined to teach, how­ever, and we had already set our start­ing date. I remem­ber think­ing, Okay, God, I’ll start as pri­mary teacher, but I’m doing it reluc­tantly. Please bring a teacher and let me lead and evan­ge­lize as you have gifted and called me to do.

Recently, when I hit emo­tional bot­tom, I decided to do another gift analy­sis. The results were exactly the same as eigh­teen years before: lead­er­ship and evan­ge­lism above teach­ing and admin­is­tra­tion. But as I thought about my weekly respon­si­bil­i­ties, I real­ized I was using teach­ing as though it were my top gift. Sel­dom was I devot­ing time to lead­er­ship or evangelism.

I have talked with well-​​respected teach­ers across the country, and I have never had one tell me that it takes him more than five to ten hours to pre­pare a ser­mon. They have strong teach­ing gifts, so it comes nat­u­rally and quickly to them. If I, on the other hand, don’t devote twenty hours to a mes­sage, I’m embar­rassed by the result. I was will­ing to put in those hours, but slowly and surely, the time demand squeezed out oppor­tu­ni­ties to use my gifts in lead­er­ship and evangelism.

In order to ade­quately pre­pare my mes­sages, I had del­e­gated away almost all lead­er­ship respon­si­bil­i­ties. And too often in elder or staff meet­ings, I was men­tally pre­oc­cu­pied with my next mes­sage. My life became con­sumed by the use of my teach­ing gift, which wasn’t my most fruit­ful or ful­fill­ing min­istry. Yet peo­ple kept say­ing, “Great mes­sage, Bill,” and I wrong­fully allowed their affir­ma­tion to thwart my bet­ter judgment.

Since real­iz­ing this, we have imple­mented a team-​​teaching approach at Wil­low Creek. It has been well received by the con­gre­ga­tion and has allowed me to pro­vide stronger lead­er­ship in sev­eral areas. It would be dif­fi­cult for me to describe how much more ful­filled I’m feel­ing these days.

I have also found new oppor­tu­ni­ties for evan­ge­lism. Recently I met with three guys at an air­port. One is a Chris­t­ian, and the other two are his best friends, whom he is try­ing to lead to Christ. As we talked, I could feel the Holy Spirit at work. After our con­ver­sa­tion ended, I ran to my gate, and I almost started crying. I love doing this, I thought. This is such a big part of who I am. I used to lead peo­ple to Christ, but I’ve been prepar­ing so many mes­sages in the past five years that I’ve for­got­ten how thrilling it is to share Christ infor­mally with lost people.

If I’m using a third– or fourth-​​level gift a lot, I shouldn’t be sur­prised if I don’t feel emo­tional energy for min­istry. We oper­ate with more energy when we’re able to exer­cise our pri­mary gifts. God knew what he was doing as he dis­trib­uted gifts for ser­vice. As we min­is­ter in a way that is con­sis­tent with the way God made us, we will find new pas­sion for ministry.

Bal­anc­ing the Eter­nal and the Earthly

Finally, becom­ing emo­tion­ally depleted re-​​taught me a les­son I had learned but for­got­ten. I learned the hard way that a Chris­t­ian leader has to strike a del­i­cate bal­ance between involve­ment in the eter­nal and involve­ment in the mun­dane. The daily things of life pro­vide needed coun­ter­weight to time­less truths.

When we started the church in 1975, I had dis­cre­tionary time that I used to race motor­cy­cles, fly a plane, golf, and ski. I had rela­tion­ships out­side the con­gre­ga­tion and inter­ests other than the church.

Since that time, the needs of the church inex­orably squeezed out these earthly pur­suits. I became con­sumed with the eter­nal. I’m an early riser, so from 5:30 in the morn­ing until I crash at 10:30 at night, barely one moment of time is not related to some­thing eter­nal. I don’t exer­cise at the YMCA any­more; I work out on equip­ment in my base­ment. While I’m cycling I read the­o­log­i­cal jour­nals. When I pump weights, I lis­ten to tapes or think of illus­tra­tions for a mes­sage. The eter­nal co-​​opted the daily routines.

In Jesus’ day, peo­ple approached life dif­fer­ently. In the Bible, after Jesus min­is­ters or deliv­ers an impor­tant dis­course, usu­ally you’ll find a phrase like this: “Then Jesus and the dis­ci­ples went from Judea into Galilee.” Those small phrases are highly sig­nif­i­cant. Such jour­neys were usu­ally many miles long, and most of the time Jesus and his dis­ci­ples walked. You don’t take a multi-​​mile walk over a lunch break.

What hap­pens on a long walk? Guys tell a few jokes, stop and rest awhile, pick some fruit and drink some water, take a siesta in the after­noon, and then keep going. All this time, emo­tional reserves are being replen­ished, and the del­i­cate bal­ance between the eter­nal and the mun­dane is being restored.
It’s a dif­fer­ent world today, and I wasn’t prop­erly aware of the changes. Put car phones and fax machines and jet air­planes into the sys­tem, and sud­denly the nat­u­rally forced times for the mundane disappear.

Recently I made a com­mit­ment to speak in north­ern Michi­gan. Later the per­son who invited me called back and asked, ”Can you give two talks while you’re here?” I agreed. He called back sev­eral weeks later and said, “Bill, we need you to give three talks while you’re here, and if you could meet with some of our peo­ple for break­fast, that would be great, too.”

“How am I going to get there in time?” I asked. ”We’ll send a plane for you.” Not too long after that call, another per­son called me from Texas. ”Bill,” he said, “I’m in deep weeds. I’ve got a thou­sand col­lege kids com­ing, and the speaker we had lined up bailed out. Most of these kids have read your book Too Busy Not to Pray, and we built the whole thing around your book. Could you help us out?”

“When is it?” I asked. He told me, and I said, “I don’t think that’s going to work, because I’m going to be in north­ern Michi­gan that morning.” He asked, “How are you get­ting there?” ”This guy’s send­ing a plane,” I said. He said, “Well, could you call the guy and see if the plane could bring you down here?”

The result was that I got on a plane at 7:00 on a Fri­day morn­ing and flew to north­ern Michi­gan, met with the lead­ers, gave three talks, and had a meet­ing over lunch. Then I got back in the plane and flew all the way to south­ern Texas, with a per­son pump­ing me for infor­ma­tion most of the time. I met with another set of lead­ers over din­ner, gave two talks, got back on the plane, and arrived home at 1 A.M. Sat­ur­day morn­ing. Then I preached Sat­ur­day evening and twice on Sun­day morning.

The point is that spir­i­tu­ally, I was fine—I had main­tained my dis­ci­plines and was striv­ing to obey Christ. Phys­i­cally, I held up fine—it wasn’t like run­ning a marathon. But I was totally depleted emotionally. I was fill­ing my life chock full of eter­nal opportunities.

What’s wrong with that? Besides the emo­tional drain, I real­ized two other hid­den costs of such a ministry-​​centered lifestyle.

First, if you are con­cerned only with spir­i­tual activ­i­ties, you tend to lose sight of the hope­less­ness of peo­ple apart from Christ. You’re never in their world.
Sec­ond, you lose your won­der of the church, of sal­va­tion, and of being part of the work of God. You can over­load on eter­nal tasks to the point that you no longer appre­ci­ate their glories.

I should have known this, because what has saved my min­istry are my sum­mer study breaks. Dur­ing those weeks away, in between study­ing, I jog or sail, often with non-​​believers. That’s when I feel a renewed com­pas­sion for them, for I see afresh the hope­less­ness and self-​​destructiveness of life out­side of Christ. Dur­ing these breaks I also start miss­ing wor­ship at our church, and I begin crav­ing rela­tion­ships with the staff and elders.

Hav­ing enough of the mun­dane in my life makes me see the futil­ity of the world and the won­der and delights of the Chris­t­ian life. I can­not con­tinue to work sev­enty– and eighty-​​hour weeks for many rea­sons, not the least of which is that they don’t allow enough time to be away from the church so that I love it when I come to it.

Know­ing this, I have renewed my com­mit­ment to inte­grate into my life more activ­i­ties that are not church related. I’m golf­ing more. I recently enrolled in a for­mula rac­ing school and learned to drive race cars. This past sum­mer I learned how to bare­foot ski. I want to fly air­planes. If I don’t sched­ule these things—if I wait till my cal­en­dar opens up—they don’t happen.

In Chris­t­ian min­istry the needs of peo­ple are endless. At a cer­tain point I have to tell myself, Bill, you had bet­ter wake up to the fact that you’re not going to get all your work done. It will be there tomor­row. I’m deter­min­ing to live a healthy life so that I can offer more than a few short years of fren­zied activity.

My goal is to mon­i­tor my spir­i­tual, phys­i­cal, and emo­tional resources so that I can min­is­ter, by God’s grace, for a lifetime.

I often think of Billy Gra­ham, who has been a high-​​integrity leader for the cause of Jesus Christ for forty-​​five years. He’s hum­ble, pure-hearted, and self-​​effacing, and every day he draws on the suf­fi­ciency of Christ.

It was a pen­e­trat­ing thought for me to think, What if God wants to elon­gate my min­istry? If God does’ t change his call in my life, can I con­tinue to live at my cur­rent pace for another twenty years? I knew I couldn’t.

I’m con­vinced God wants us to live so as to fin­ish the race we’ve started. That’s the chal­lenge of every Chris­t­ian leader. And mon­i­tor­ing all three gauges— spir­i­tual, phys­i­cal, and emotional—plays an impor­tant part in our longevity.

Source: Bill Hybels