Latest / Prayer Before Work / You Built the Whole Department. Now You Can Barely Open Your Laptop. - Prayer Before Work
Transcript
- C0686: You built the whole department from nothing, and now you can barely make yourself open up your laptop. Hey, this is Sean, and welcome back to Prayer Before Work. Now this one came from a manager who's been in the working world about ten years, started in an entry-level customer support role, learned everything they could, and worked their way up to running operations at a tech company. Now they built the team that they have from the ground up. And I mean, you know how this goes, twelve hour days at the start. You know, they did great work and now they just feel empty. They've already taken a week of medical leave for burnout, and they used all their time off, and they still need the paycheck. So they're asking, how do I just coast without anybody noticing? And if that's where you are this morning, I'm not going to scold you. Exhaustion like that is real. And wanting to check out is often what a worn out person does to survive. But I do want to offer you something better than coasting and hoping that nobody catches it. So in the book of Mark, in chapter six, Jesus' disciples, they come back from a stretch of hard nonstop work, and they're telling him everything they did, and the crowds are still pressing in. Now the text says They didn't even have time to eat. And Jesus says to them in verse 31, come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while. So Jesus doesn't tell them to keep showing up or to keep faking it. I mean, he really identifies the need and he makes room for it because rest wasn't something that they had to sneak in. But here's why that matters for you. Coasting in secret has a cost. You spend energy hiding, worrying about getting caught, and feeling guilty every time you do the bare minimum. You end up trading one kind of tired for another kind. So what if instead of just disappearing on the job, you maybe tried to resize it? I mean, you built this team. Is there someone on it ready to own more? I mean, think about the parts of your job that drain your energy and delegate that work. Now, I frequently have misjudged some tasks as things that no one else would want to do either. But then I found someone who was enthusiastic about it and ended up doing it much better than I could. And if that's not possible, then maybe have a conversation with your boss about workload before your body forces that conversation on you, and it will. And outside of work, is anyone helping you carry this? A friend, maybe someone from church or a colleague who knows how bad it's gotten? Because burnout this deep usually needs more than just a better calendar arrangement. So let's pray. Lord, some of us are running on nothing this morning. We've given a lot and we're tired. And tired in ways that sleep is not fixing. But we thank you that you don't ask us to pretend, but show us where we can set things down, who we can hand things to, and who we need to ask for help. And Lord, give us courage to be honest with ourselves about where we are. Restore what has been drained and help us find a pace that we can actually keep. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen. Go make today count.