As good as all of that is, there is no better tool than the Bible to define who we are. I think most reading this blog would agree. When our faith in who we are in God’s eyes meets the reality of daily life, if we’re honest, we know we often fall way short.

Let me drive this painfully home. I want to be the best husband I can be in all practical ways possible. I want to be Colleen’s knight in shining armor who sweeps her off her feet to save the day. She struggles with a 12 year diagnosis of Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis. You’d never know it if you met her becasue she does her best (and then some) to not let it stop her.

Last weekend, her shoulder froze for no apparent reason. That’s just life for her. Jump to tonight, when she gets home from her job teaching Certified Nurse’s Assistants at our local Adult School. She has planned a Jafra party for our house tomorrow night. The tile floor (lots of it) needs to be mopped.

Can you see it? The knight in shining armor? Mr. Clean with broom and mop in hand to save the day? Not in the least! In my dreams! Instead, here was my selfishness rearing its ugly head. (Hear the whine….) “I hate mopping this floor!”

What does that have to do with figuring out who you are? Well, beyond all the education and self-discovery comes the hard work of discipleship. And it’s deeper than just applying a few Scripture, although that’s helpful. It is coming to terms with who I really am and having the integrity to have courage that meets the demands of my reality. (That’s classic Henry Cloud & John Towsend, in case you’re wondering.)

The path of discipleship, becoming like Christ, Whose image we were created in from the beginning, is hard work, friends. Inherent in it is getting to know you. The REAL you. That includes your motivations (WHY you do what you do), your intentions (WHERE you desire to go with what you do), and your actions (HOW you do what you do to get where you’re going). And those are deep issues.

For me, tonight, it was “will I steer clear of the thing I don’t want, or even HATE, to do for the sake of my own comfort, or will I serve my wife, my kids, and our family by putting me aside?

When’s the last time you had to face this dilemma? At home OR at work/ministry?

I was quite surprised and blessed when my original article here was used in its entirety to report Wayne’s surgery to the MentoringLeaders.com family. In the process, I’ve been able to contact Wayne, and he has agreed to do an interview with PastorForLife.org regarding his recent crisis and return to ministry.

However, I am very excited to also lead you to a couple of recent posts at MentoringLeaders.com that give a sneak peek of his soon-to-be-released book titled, “Leading On Empty”. He writes it out of his personal experience with burnout a few years ago.

Having survived burnout myself as a Pastor, it’s not often that we who go through this crisis end up with the privilege of continuing to serve the same congregation. Often, that’s because the burnout ended up leading to a moral failure of some sort that disqualified a Pastor’s ministry.

I have come to learn that there are MANY of us whose burnout does not lead to any kind of moral failure. Yet still, church leaders often assume that if the Pastor is experiencing burnout, there must be SOMEthing that’s not right that would damage the trust of the leaders or congregation in that Pastor to regain health and lead again. Most often, nothing could be further from the truth.

Wayne is one of the few who is opening his life and his story so that other Pastors might find help and wholeness on the road to healing. I encourage you to check out the Sneak Peek 1 and Sneak Peek 2 of “Leading On Empty”.

AND, stay tuned here at PastorForLife.org for our upcoming interview to learn more from Wayne’s story.

After an eye checkup with an opthamologist a few months ago, I just didn’t want to break down and spend the money on suggested prescription glasses. The doctor even said himself that my prescription was even less than reading glasses you would buy off a shelf in a pharmacy. But the recurrent headaches weren’t decreasing. So glasses it was.

The first Sunday I walked into the Sanctuary wearing my new glasses, I was amazed; almost convinced that someone had installed a brand new projector for us! The screen was so clear that it stunned me for a few moments. I had no idea what a big difference something so small could make.

Solomon wrote about how small things can make a big difference, even devastating the fruit of your life if you’re not careful. ” Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom.” (Song of Solomon 2.15)

My recurrent headaches? The more I wear the glasses (hard as they’ve been to get used to), the fewer and less intense the recurrent headaches. Amazing. “Smaller prescription than off the shelf reading glasses.” Who would’ve thought?

What are “the little foxes” that have stolen your fruit, threatening to ruin your vineyards lately?

This is a great opportunity to observe how a leader returns to ministry after a life-threatening crisis at the same time as determining how he will (or for some, IF he will) do life and ministry differently. For starters in this particular situation, it seems that at the very least, Wayne is coming back slowly.

You can watch the message he preached here called “Things We Must Do For Ourselves” in a very innovative manner. In the beginning, he mentions that the church will hear the message in this way over the next 4 weeks.

While New Hope has many campuses and they do much by satellite and live video feeds, whoever brings the message (primarily Wayne) almost always does so live at their main campus with FIVE services every weekend.

Wayne has already mentioned that his heart condition was somewhat the result of pushing too hard by preaching five services every weekend for many years. So …. what’s a mega-church (giga-church is a growing new term for churches of New Hope’s size) Pastor to do?

Well, Wayne’s first message back was a mixture of video and live speaking. The bulk of the message he actually preached on video, which was done very creatively.

It was well-mixed with Wayne speaking the message and some illustrative dramatic and musical elements. Wayne introduced the video live, segued with some live comments in the middle, went back to the video, finished the teaching with a live special song with the New Hope Worship Team and then Wayne brought the conclusion of the service live.

This, in my opinion, is a great example of what I call “Finding Your Personal Pace“. It will be interesting to see how Wayne and New Hope will progress from here. I have a hunch we will see some incredibly innovative and well-led ways for a Pastor to recover from a crisis in his life such as this.

Folks, you can be the most positive minded person in the world, but you can’t escape the reality of personal crisis happening even in the Pastor’s life. How we handle that crisis can mean everything for ourselves and our leadership.

Do you know of another Pastor who has had to handle personal crisis from the pulpit? If it’s OK to share it publically, feel free to do so in the comments. Let’s learn how to do this together, so we can do it better in the future!

Arch Hart, in his book, “Adrenaline & Stress”, lays out his study on the impact of adrenaline on a person’s body. He emphasizes the impact it has on Pastors in the book, as well as in many of his talks to groups of Pastors.

Over the last few years, with Arch’s help, I’ve grown to identify much of the awful after-effects of preaching as adrenal letdown. Preaching demands the use of adrenaline and I find that many Pastors either have no idea, or they completely deny, its impact. You know, we’re Superman/women/people, right? What might impact others negatively, God will protect us from! (In case you’re wondering, yes, my tongue is in my cheek as I write that!)

Arch contends that when you expend an inordinate amount of adrenaline, like we Pastors do when we preach, you are bound to experience a letdown of the adrenaline so that the system, the body, can recover and restore itself back to a normal state. There are various brain chemicals involved in the cycle, including serotonin, which can drop low as adrenaline restores, resulting in a feeling of depression at different levels.

How much time it takes to recover and what the symptoms of the recovery are can be different for everyone. For me, I find that on Monday, it’s common for me to develop a low grade headache right behind my eyes. I call it my “serotonin-low” headache. And there’s a general malaise that I often experience.

Have you identified the impact of adrenaline recovery after you preach? What are your common signs?

Ever wondered what this orange icon with the white radio wave-like symbol was all about? That’s an indication that the site you are visiting has an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed available. If you have signed up to use Google Reader, you can just click on that button anywhere on the Web and you’ll have the opportunity to subscribe to the content. It’s simple…really simple.

Now, are you ready to give it a test-drive? Let me give you two easy steps to get started.

1. Register for a Google Reader account.

2. Come back to my site and click the “subscribe to RSS” icon.

That’s it. Now you know why they call it “really simple syndication.” Here’s the best part, you can also subscribe to other websites using your same Google Reader account. Let me recommend these RSS feeds (clicking on them here will subscribe you if you have your Google Reader account set up already):

• Wayne Cordeiro
• Kevin Martineau
• Pete Scazzero
• Anne Jackson
• Pete Wilson
• Jan Owen
• Tony Morgan
  
• Church Marketing Sucks
• My Personal Blog

Well, you get the picture. You can subscribe to just about anything you’d like to know about using Google Reader and RSS feeds. The best part? It’s all FREE! I just saved you time and money.

There are other tools that do the same thing; however, Google Reader is a great place to start. Let me know how it works.

Another easy way to connect regularly is to subscribe by email. When you do that, every time Pastor For Life has a new post, you get it delivered in your email inbox. While I personally use Google Reader to follow my feeds, if you’re only following a few, this might be your preferred method of staying connected with us.

For you RSS veterans, what’s your favorite feed aggregator? And, more importantly, what’s your favorite feed?

HT: Tony Morgan

Part of his statement reported, “My right artery was 95-99% blocked and two other places were 85-90% blocked. Nevertheless my surgeon was able to stretch the blockages and got in three stents, so I missed a bypass by a miracle. I am sore but so thankful for the “mulligan” I got from God.”

You can read his entire public statement to his congregation here. I commend his honesty and integrity in communicating with his church family.

He shared his personal story about encountering burnout at Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit in August of 2006, and is releasing a book about it soon called, “Dead Leader Running”.

Wayne pastors one of the largest and fastest growing churches in America, averaging over 10,000 people a weekend and only 13 years old, with no permanent facilities! I can’t keep track of how many services they run a weekend and how many campuses they do the at throughout Oahu.

I do know that Wayne is one of the healthiest Pastors I know of. His regimen of exercise and taking care of his physical body, let alone his spiritual devotional life, are well known. There are myriad numbers of Pastors that have been through his “Leadership Practicums” and untold numbers of churches that have been impacted by his “Life Journal” method of Scripture reading and journaling.

Not only do my prayer and concern go out to Wayne as he recovers (I don’t think he’d ever read this to know, and I don’t know him well personally), but God answers prayer whether people being prayed for know it or not, doesn’t He? I want to ask you to pray for him as well, would you?

The influence Wayne has stewarded so very well throughout his journey has been tremendous, and not one of us would want to see that impeded in any way! Pray for the saints of New Hope as well, that they would allow for this period of rest and recovery that Wayne needs.

We here at Pastor For Life wish Pastor Wayne a healthy recovery and blessings of peace and comfort to he and his entire family!

I am an email fiend if there ever was one, love Twitter, and think you should follow me for the fun of it. At the same time, I try to have some semblance of availability as a Pastor that doesn’t border on or cross the line of neuroticism. There are some distractions that are controllable, if we so choose. I know I must work at limiting them for the good of my own soul.

Thanks to my friend, Bob Hyatt, I quote Ruth Haley Barton, from her book, Sacred Rhythms, as follows:

“It’s not that I am averse to technology; I too have a cell phone, an office phone, a home phone and an email address, and they are much needed. However, I am aware of longings that run much deeper than what technology can address. I am noticing that the more I fill my life with the convenience of technology, the emptier I become in the places of my deepest longing. I long for the beauty and substance of being in the presence of those I love, even though it is less convenient. I long for spacious, thoughtful conversation even though it is less efficient. I long to be connected with my authentic self, even though it means being inaccessible to others at time. I long to be one who waits and listens deeply for the still, small voice of God, even if it means I must unplug from technology in order to become quiet enough to hear.

Constant noise, interruption and drivenness to be more productive cut us off from or at least interrupt the direct experience of God and other human beings, and this is more isolating than we realize. Because we are experiencing less meaningful and divine connection, we are emptier relationally, and we try harder and harder to fill that loneliness with even more noise and stimulation. In so doing we lose touch with the quieter and more subtler experiences of God within.

This is a vicious cycle indeed.”

Well said, don’t you think? If you’re NOT thinking about it or can’t grasp it, therein may lie the problem of which we speak. Just a thought!

I honestly have mixed feelings about the fact that none of those killed or injured were a part of the congregation I serve as Pastor. I am so grateful that our Church Family can share stories of God’s hand being upon circumstances that would have had a number of them on that very train. For various reasons, they weren’t.

The mixed feelings come in for those that were not spared somehow. I don’t come anywhere near trying to have answers anymore. I used to. At one time, I felt the pressure of having to produce some kind of answer that would somehow save someone from the grief ahead of them in their uncertainty.

Somewhere along the way, I got honest. I started to finally just say, “I am so sorry for your loss. I wish I could take your pain for you. I have no answers.”

I do, however, point people to God. He may not give us our answer today, but someday, we will get it. I believe that beyond cliche or form answer. I believe it to the depths of my very soul. And that’s where I point people.

He’s the Savior, I am not. When I rest my heart in that truth, I am able to navigate crisis becomes a lot differently.

That doesn’t mean that crisis is any easier. When it comes home, everything else adjusts. (Thus, my absence from posting here for a number of days.)

Where the crisis did come home for me was as a friend to Pastors in town and as a Police Chaplain.

As a friend to Pastors, I have a couple of friends who DID lose people in their church and whose congregants were badly injured. I have offered a shoulder and an ear.

As a Police Chaplain, I was not at the scene of the accident, but did get called upon to represent our City in two public gatherings held to memorialize and offer opportunities for people to grieve and mourn. That is a true honor to me.

Being a Chaplain puts me in places behind the scenes that others rarely get to see and experience. Watching City officials grapple with the demands and responsibilities of their leadership while still allowing for their own grief is an interesting place. (Just a quick plug … I am very proud of how our City has responded to and handled this incident.)

Bottom line as it pertains to Pastor For Life …. when crisis comes home, everything else must adjust. You can’t give what you don’t have. Crisis situations demand a lot more giving than everyday life.

If you’re facing tragedy and crisis in your life, be sure to find the people God has placed in your path that YOU can lean on. Give yourself extra time and grace to allow your own mind and soul to wrap itself around what just happened and what continues to unravel over the next days and weeks. It is a process that takes time.

Check out the other blogs listed on these pages and give them a good read!