The Last Person We Care For
If you're a woman, this person might be you
Months ago, I wrote about the possibility that burnout comes in different shapes and at greater rates for women in ministry. As one article put it, “women are facing a historically high risk of burnout, and there is a growing gap between rates of burnout for women and men.”1 It doesn’t feel like a jump to expect this trend to carry into the field of ministry.
As I talk with women in ministry, one complicating factor I’ve noticed is that the modern church has somehow instilled in a lot of us that we basically should work and serve ourselves into the ground. Women articulate it to me in different ways, but it’s something along the lines of:
Whenever there’s a need before me, I should do everything I can to help the person in need.
If I don’t make everyone in this situation feel cared for and happy and seen, then I haven’t done enough.
I should be able to juggle everything before me with ease and gratefulness. If, instead, I get irritable or tired, something must be wrong with me spiritually.
Or, if I can put it simply, “I should just be able to do it all.” A secular person might say, “I should magically be able to do it all,” and in the church we tend to spiritualize that into “I should supernaturally be able to do it all through Christ.” (Lest we forget, women are doing more than men in unpaid household and childcare labor already… so “doing it all” for women looks like doing, well, a lot.)
And when we can’t do it all, the internal scripts say something like: “I’m not enough. Why can’t I just be more grateful, selfless, and perfect?”
Now, hear me out: there’s a place to examine ourselves for entitlement, selfishness, and irritability; and Christ can empower us to do things that would normally be beyond our capacity.
And yet, this way of thinking is missing an important truth: we have limits to our capacities. We are not God. God designed us with limits, and therefore does not call us to “do it all.” Rather, he calls us to honor our limits. This is part of the genius of the command to rest and observe Sabbath — it sets a boundary for our work, which means that there will be things we do not do.
When we take on more than we actually have capacity for, it’s no wonder that we end up tired and irritable. Instead of only regarding those feelings as indicators that something is deficient with us, we should pay attention to when they might mean that we are trying to do too much — trying to play the role of God and “do it all.”
With women in ministry, I often see this play out as they endlessly care for others. It’s part of what Shelley Taylor has coined the “tending instinct” in women, where we naturally care for and tend to others in hardship. In many ways this is beautiful and reflects the caring, shepherding heart of God. It’s one way we see his image imprinted in women.
The problem comes when the last person that women think to care for is themselves. They want others to be cared for so well, yet they rarely stop to ask themselves, “But am I receiving the same kind of care, too?” When I see women in burnout or on the way to burnout, the ratio of how much they are pouring out to how much they are getting poured into or caring for themselves is usually starkly out of balance.
Finding a better balance and learning to care for ourselves is not easily learned, though. We have to learn to recognize our capacity and to trust God with the things that we do not have capacity for. We have to learn how to receive care ourselves… or perhaps even harder, to ask for help and care from others.
This is difficult, when the explicit and implicit messages you’ve been receiving for a lifetime essentially tell you, “You must serve, serve, serve, and care, care, care. If you don’t or can’t, you’re not enough. Also, if you ask for others to serve you or care for you, you are too much.”
And yet, this hard stuff is actually the basis of our faith. The Christian faith isn’t founded on the idea that we’re “in” if we can keep serving and doing it all. The way “in” is through confessing that we cannot do it all and asking God to extend mercy and grace. What if, before God calls you to shepherd and care for others, he wants you to first receive his shepherding care for you — which includes his call to rest and honor your limits?