The Burnout Nobody Noticed

There is a stationery cupboard on the second floor, and she can tell you everything about it.

She can tell you that the door sticks, so it has to be pulled and then lifted. That the light comes on a second late. That there are four boxes of the wrong staples on the top shelf that nobody has ordered since before she started. That if you stand with your back against the shelving unit and slide down until you are sitting on the floor, the boxes hide you from the little window in the door.

She has been going in there for about a year. Eight minutes, sometimes eleven. Then she stands up, does her sleeves, opens the door that sticks, and goes back out to be the person everybody says they do not know what they would do without.

That is the phrase, actually. They say it at least twice a week. We do not know what we would do without you. They say it warmly and they mean it kindly and every time it lands on her like another crate.

Because here is the shape of her life at the moment. She is the one who remembers birthdays. She is the one who covers when someone is off. She is the one her sister rings, and the one her mother rings, and the one the neighbor with the leaking roof rings. Her appraisal last month used the word outstanding twice. And she went home and sat in the car on the drive for forty minutes, because the car is the only room in her life where nobody needs anything from her, and then she came in and was pleasant.

Nobody has noticed. Not one person. And the reason nobody has noticed is not that they are careless. It is that she is very, very good at this, and competence is the best hiding place ever invented.

You know the cupboard. Yours might be a car, or a bathroom at work, or a lay-by two streets from your own front door where you sit with the engine off. Wherever it is, you have been going there for a while, and you have come to this message with nothing in your hands, and I am not going to ask you for anything.

The first thing heaven said to a man with nothing left

There is a man in Scripture who had the biggest day of his working life and was empty within a week of it.

Fire had fallen in front of a whole nation. He had run further than a horse. It was the sort of day people build statues about. And a short while later he was a day's walk out into the wilderness, sitting under a broom tree on his own, asking God to let him die because he could not do any more.

Now watch what heaven did, because this is the part almost nobody has been told, and it is the reason I am writing to you.

There was no sermon. There was no correction. There was no reminder of what he had just been part of, and no word about how a man of his calling should not be talking like that. Nothing at all was asked of him.

He was allowed to sleep. Then he was touched on the shoulder and told to eat, and there was bread already baked and water already poured, and he ate and drank and lay straight back down and slept again. Nobody hurried him. And then, the second time:

And the angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, "Arise, eat, for the journey is too great for you."1 Kings 19:7

Read that reason again, slowly, because it is God's own diagnosis of a burnt out man and it is the kindest sentence in the chapter.

The journey is too great for you.

God said it first. Not the man. God, out loud, through a messenger, about a servant He was not the least bit disappointed in. Heaven's verdict on his emptiness was not you should be stronger. It was this is too much, and I have brought you food.

So hear it where you are sitting. The thing you have been refusing to admit in case it makes you a lesser person is the thing God is willing to say about you first. It is too much. It has been too much for a long time. That is not a character flaw and it is not a spiritual failure, and there is no version of this where you did not have enough faith. You had enough faith to keep going for years on empty, which is more faith than most people spend in a decade.

And the food came before anything was required of him. He was fed at the point where he had produced nothing, wanted nothing and offered nothing, lying under a bush in the middle of nowhere with his back to the whole story.

That is who God is with the depleted. He feeds first. He asks later, and gently, and not today.

Now here is what is yours, and it costs you nothing to use.

You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to speak into your own life has been handed to you, and tonight it has exactly one job. There is a voice in your house that says keep going, keep up, do not let anybody see. That voice is not the Holy Spirit. It does not sound like the God who baked bread for a man who wanted to die. You have every right to put it out, and you do not have to feel strong to say so, because the strength in this is not in the person speaking, it is in the Name they are speaking in.

Two plain things, said with love. Tell one actual human being this week. Not everything, just the true sentence. And if the flatness has gone on for months, or getting up has become genuinely hard, book a doctor, because exhaustion this deep deserves a proper look and there is nothing unspiritual about that. If tonight you have found yourself thinking that everyone would be better off without you, please ring for help now: in the United States call or text 988, and anywhere else your local crisis line or emergency number. That comes before anything else on this page.