Too Tired to Pray

ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE plants in nature is the Ibervillea sonorae. It can exist for seemingly indefinite periods without soil or even water. As Annie Dillard tells the story, one was kept in a display case at the New York Botanical Garden for seven years without soil or water. For seven springs it sent out little anticipatory shoots looking for water. Finding none, it simply dried up again, hoping for better luck next year.

Now that’s what I call perseverance: hanging on, keeping on when it’s not easy.

But perseverance has its limits, even for the Ibervillea sonorae. In its eighth year of no water, the rather sadistic scientists at the New York Botanical Gardens had a dead plant on their hands.

Most of us know what it’s like to find ourselves past our seventh season, bereft of water, thirsty, and waiting for the eighth spring. No more energy and barely enough hope to send out one more pathetic little shoot. And it happens to us more like seven or eight times a year. Would that we could last like that tough little desert plant.

Sometimes it’s simple fatigue that finally takes its toll. Too much work, a lingering illness, or poor diet come singly or in combination, and we find ourselves desperately in need of a good night’s sleep, a day off, a walk in the park, or an antibiotic. That’s all there is to it. Simple fatigue, simple treatment, and we snap back like a rubber band.

Deeper meaning

But there may be a deeper meaning to our thirst and fatigue. John Sanford paints a picture of this in his description of an old well that stood outside the front door of a family farmhouse in New Hampshire. The water from the well was remarkably pure and cold. No matter how hot the summer or how severe the drought, the well was always a source of refreshment and joy. The faithful old well was a big part of his memories of summer vacations at the farmhouse.

The years passed and eventually the farmhouse was modernized. Wiring brought electric lights, and indoor plumbing brought hot and cold running water. The old well was no longer needed, so it was sealed for use in possible future emergencies.

But one day, years later, Sanford had a hankering for the cold, pure water of his youth. So he unsealed the well and lowered a bucket for a nostalgic taste of the delightful refreshment he remembered. He was shocked to discover that the well that once had survived the severest droughts was bone dry! Perplexed, he began to ask questions of the locals who knew about these kinds of things. He learned that wells of that sort were fed by hundreds of tiny underground rivulets which seep a steady flow of water. As long as the water is drawn out of the well, new water will flow in through the rivulets, keeping them open for more to flow. But when the water stops flowing, the rivulets clog with mud and close up. The well dried up not because it was used too much, but because it wasn’t used enough!

Sanford observed that our souls are like that well.1 If we do not draw on the living water that Jesus promised would well up in us like a spring (John 7:38), our hearts close and dry up, and we find ourselves in our “eighth season.” The consequence for not drinking deeply of God is to eventually lose the ability to drink at all. Prayerlessness is its own punishment, both its disease and its cause. That’s the deeper meaning to our fatigue in the ministry.

Acedia

So like people dying of thirst in the desert, we stagger exhausted and aimless through our days. Preaching, teaching, training, counseling, and administrating become intolerably burdensome because we have somehow forgotten why we are doing them. This weariness comes close to what medieval theologians called the deadly sin of sloth or acedia. Simple fatigue says, “I know I should be doing this, but I just can’t seem co generate the energy.” Acedia says, “Why? What difference does it make?”

“Acedia is all of Friday consumed in getting out the Sunday bulletin,” says Richard John Neuhaus in Freedom for Ministry. “Acedia is three hours dawdled away on Time magazine, which is then guiltily chalked up to ‘study.’ Acedia is evenings without number obliterated by television, evenings neither of entertainment nor of education, but of narcotized defense against time and duty. Above all, acedia is apathy, the refusal to engage the pathos of other lives and of God’s life with them.”2

A physician friend gave me an article from the Journal of Internal Medicine that dealt with the psychological state conducive to illness called the “giving up, given up complex.” It is found in people who lose the reasons for living; who are saying of their existence, “Why? What difference does it make?”

Acedia can make bodies vulnerable to disease and pastors terminally tired of the ministry.

Hyperactivity

Curiously, spiritual fatigue can produce what appears to be the opposite of sloth or acedia: hyperactivity. But in reality, it is just another dimension of the same thirst and sense of “why” that saps us of our ability to do the “what” of ministry. “Hyperactivity and sloth are twin sins,”3 says Neuhaus, and rightly so. The only real difference is the anxious, frenetic shape hyperactivity takes. Too tired to pray, or too busy to pray: both are flip sides of the same coin. Either we stagger through our days exhausted and aimless like people dying of thirst in the desert; or like children lost in the woods, the more lost we feel, the faster we run.

Driving is the word that describes the schedules of so many of us who are no longer motivated to do the real work of the ministry. Hyperactivity is to authentic motivation as junk food is to a nourishing diet. It gives us the feeling of satisfaction while starving us to death. In the New Testament it is the Ephesian syndrome described in Revelation 2:1-7. The first love is gone, and now all that is left is the form and the trappings. This may be the malady most preyed upon by the innumerable seminars offered today on the techniques of church leadership. When we forget “why” we become obsessed with “how.” Where once there was creativity and the tenderness born of deep love, there is now only the sex manual.

I crashed emotionally when I was twenty-six years old. I had dried up inside, and I was lost and running. Let’s see if I can remember all I was doing: I was a full-time seminary student, head resident in the men’s dorm at a local Christian college—that was full time, too—and I was working part time as the area director for Young Life in a nearby city. I was also on retainer as a speaker for a Christian conference center. In addition, my personal life was a contradiction to much of what I was preaching.

I came back to my room at the dorm one evening so tired I went straight to bed at eleven o’clock. That’s early for a student living in a resident hall. Immediately I fell asleep and had a terrible nightmare. In the dream, I was backed into a corner by pale, ghoulish creatures who were plucking and tearing at my flesh, taking large chunks with each lunge. I awoke with a jerk and laid there for a while doing what I always do when I have a nightmare: I tried to talk myself back to reality. But I couldn’t, because the dream was reality. I finally had to get up, get dressed, and walk around the dorm for a while just to get over the terror I felt. Only then could I go back to bed and go to sleep.

When I awoke the next morning, I felt like I had a hangover. (At that time in my life, I knew what a hangover felt like.) But I hadn’t drunk anything the night before. To clear my head, I decided to walk over to the college track and go for a run. But when I got there, the gate was locked. I had climbed over the eight-foot fence many times, but this time it was just too much for me. If you would have seen me there that day you would have seen a young man bawling like a baby. The thought of one more thing to do was overwhelming.

When I stopped crying, I managed to climb over the fence and run for a while. My head a bit clearer, on my walk back to my room, I admitted to myself that I was in big trouble. The well was dry. I hadn’t taken a drink of God in only he knew how long. I quit almost everything I was doing, got some help, made some fundamental changes in my outlook, and got on the road to health. One could say that for the next season of my life I took a pick and shovel and dug down deep to where the water had once flowed. It took a lot of sweat and work and coming to terms with no small amount of regrets, deep pain, and frustration. That’s the way it usually is with repentance. But I thank God that I came to the point sooner rather than later; at twenty-six, instead of forty-six. For us in ministry, the stakes can only get higher as we get older and acquire more responsibilities.

Has the well gotten dry since? Never as bad as then. But it still does sometimes, and the way it usually shows itself is with hyperactivity. I know it’s happening again when I go off to a quiet place for a day of prayer—and sleep all day, instead of pray. I’m so tired. It’s a sign that it’s been too long since I truly drank living water. With prayer, it can be like the so-called quality time I used to promise my spouse or children. It’s a way I excuse myself from doing what I most need, but often least want, to do. As with my loved ones, so with prayer: there is no quality without quantity. No day of prayer can atone for weeks without prayer.

Hubris

The twin sins of acedia and hyperactivity can be expanded into triplets with the addition of a third: hubris. The Greeks used the word hubris, or pride, to speak of presumption, the folly of trying to be like the gods. This vice, rather than stemming from spiritual thirst and fatigue, is their essence. For the Christian, hubris is anything we do to try to save ourselves. For those in the ministry, it is anything we do to cry to save the church or our ministry: clerical works-righteousness.

Hubris is bad enough by itself, but it also sets us up for acedia and hyperactivity. The greatest crisis I faced in my first church as a senior pastor came early, and it concerned the thing I most loved to do—preach. A pattern had developed in my weekly routine. Sunday afternoon through Monday morning I would be mildly to greatly depressed. Monday afternoon through Wednesday evening I would feel fine. Thursday I would begin to be a little irritable. The irritability would build on Friday, and on Saturday I would be very hard to live with. Then, voila! On Sunday morning I would be transformed into the caring, engaging, and totally charming person everyone but my wife knew as Pastor Ben. Then, on Sunday afternoon, I would drop back into exhaustion and depression.

Week after week this cycle repeated itself. After a few months, I found myself vacillating between frenetic activity and paralyzing sloth—sometimes within the same day. I was bipolar spiritually and emotionally. I never doubted that God had called me to preach, but I was beginning to hate what I loved. Was this the way it was going to be the rest of my life? Living to do what I couldn’t live with? Something had to change.

The insight came to me one day as I sat at my desk in my study. In the bookshelves directly across from me were the collected sermons of the preachers I revered: Spurgeon, Maclaren, Thielicke, bound in leather for posterity to read and to admire. Each week as I prepared, to preach, it was as though they sat there in critical silence, measuring me and my words like a Ph.D. dissertation committee. I wanted so to please them—and to join them! I was trying each week to preach the world’s greatest sermon; I wanted my sermons to be bound one day in leather for posterity to read and admire, too. That, I submit, is a terrible reason to preach. Instead of playing before an audience of one, God, I was playing before many: my people, my mentors, possible publishers, and generations to come. Superstar-dom escaped me each week, and the depression I felt each Sunday afternoon grew out of the disparity between what I sought and what I actually got. My sermonizing was clerical works-righteousness. Hubris had led me to shoot for fame instead of faithfulness. And it had me worn out and dry inside.

Prayer would be of inestimable value if it did nothing more than remind us of who we are before God. Unless the Lord builds the house, our work is useless (Psalm 127:1). Apart from him we can do nothing (John 15:5). Prayer is a reality check. It is impossible to both pray and be filled with hubris.

Remember why

Acedia, hyperactivity, hubris—all are forms of forget-fulness, of losing touch with the “why” and the “who” of ministry, of being cut off from the Vine, whose branches we are, and then keeping busy enough or noisy enough or narcotized enough not to have to face up to the fundamental disjointedness of our lives.

There is only one antidote to forgetfulness, and that is remembrance. In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the pilgrims were leaving the Delectable Mountains after the shepherds warned them to beware of traversing the Enchanted Ground. The overwhelming desire there would be to fall asleep, never again to awake. And it was just as the shepherds told them it would be: the drowsiness there became nearly unbearable. Hopeful pleaded for a nap, just one little rest. But Christian made him talk. He asked him the question, “By what means were you led to go on this pilgrimage?” In other words, he asked, “Why are you on this journey? Why are you doing this?” By telling the story, and thus remembering why he was on the pilgrimage, Hopeful kept talking and kept walking.

It is remembrance that keeps us awake; it is significant that the supreme act of Christian worship, the Lord’s Supper, draws us into fellowship with Christ by calling us to remember his mercy and love for us. It is a love feast spread out upon a redeemed and quickened memory. To pray is also to remember. It is to look into the face of the One who came to our side and saved us when we were lost and then called us into his service. It is to nourish the tender first love that Christ so passionately wants us to remember (Rev. 2:5). To pray is to connect again with the love that compelled us to declare the Good News to the world. To pray is to remember why we are doing this thing called ministry.

The trouble is, the more we need to remember why, the less we feel like remembering why. The more we need to pray, the less we want to. Not to pray is to lose the desire to pray, for prayerlessness is its own punishment. But pray we must. We cannot sit and wait for the desire to pray to suddenly come upon us like the tongues of fire at Pentecost. Just do it. The choices we make when we are not motivated are the most critical of our Christian walk. C. S. Lewis touched on this when he had the devil Screwtape advise his nephew Wormwood chat God sometimes overwhelms us with a sense of his presence early in our Christian experience, but that he never allows that to happen for too long. His goal is to get us to stand on our own two legs, “to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.” Screwtape observes that during such “tough periods, much more than during the peak periods,” we are growing into the creature God wants us to be.4

I cannot stress this too strongly: Just do it. You remember by remembering. You learn to pray like you learned to swim—not by talking about it but by getting in the water and splashing around. You relearn prayer the same way. Prayer is a discipline before it is a joy, and remains a discipline even after it becomes a joy. A friend, a champion wrestler, keeps a poster on the wall of his basement where he works out with weights. It shows a man straining to lift a weight, sweat fairly bursting from a grimacing face, veins bulging on his neck. The caption reads: “There are two kinds of pain: the pain of discipline, and the pain of regret.”

How like life—and the life of prayer. To be alive is to hurt. The choice is not whether to hurt, but how. That you can choose. You can choose the discomfort of the discipline of praying when you don’t feel like it, or the desolation and terminal fatigue of life and ministry without prayer.

Remember who

There’s only one thing better than remembering why you’re serving Christ; it’s remembering who he is. It is he who says to the weary and worn out, to the too-pooped-to-pray, “Come to me … and I will give you rest … and you will find rest for your souls” (Matt. 11:28-29). He knows how hard it is to do the work of the kingdom. He understands our exhaustion. He sympathizes with us even in our prayerlessness. Just to be with him is enough. There is no other one, no other place to go. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

Luke has a marvelous line in his account of Peter and John’s appearance before the Sanhedrin. He says the rulers, elders, and teachers of the law who sat in that august chamber were astonished at the courage of these unschooled and ordinary men. The greatest thing we have to offer our people is not our education. It is not our good ideas. It isn’t even our gifts and abilities. It is the fruit of the time we have spent with the Savior, the utterly unique and unparalleled thing that happens to us when we are simply in his presence.

The career road of ministry is littered with the bodies of fatigued and spent religious professionals. That’s because the ministry is not a career, nor are we who serve in it professionals. The ministry is a calling. The distinction between the two—calling and career—is pivotal if we are to understand the central place of prayer in our work.

The word career gives itself away. It comes from the French carriere, meaning a road, or a highway. The picture is of a course on which one sets out, road map in hand, goal in sight, stops marked along the way for food, lodging, and fuel. Looking back, we can speak of one’s career as the road one took in life. But more often we speak of it looking forward, as the path one chooses and plans to travel professionally, an itinerary charted and scheduled. The destination is primary. The roads are well marked. The rest is up to the traveler.

Organ of faith

A call, on the other hand, has no maps, no itinerary to follow, because a call depends on hearing a Voice. The organ of faith is the ear, not the eye; we walk by faith, not by sight. First and last, a call is something one listens for. Everything depends on the relationship of the listener to the One who calls.

It’s like the tale of a father and a son on a journey to a distant city. There were no maps. The trip would be long and hard, fraught with danger. Only the wisdom and experience of the father would get them safely to their destination. Along the way the boy grew curious about his surroundings. What was on the other side of the forest? What would he see if he stood on that distant ridge? Could he run over there and look? His father said yes.

But the boy was a little nervous. “What if I wander too far from you, Father? What if I get lost?”

The father said, “Every few minutes I will call your name and wait for your answer. Listen for my voice, my son. When you can no longer hear me you will know you’ve gone too far.”

Everything depends on the relationship of the listener to the One who calls. God called Abraham to go to a land that “I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). Why didn’t God just tell Abraham where he wanted him to go, give him what he needed to get there, and be done with it, then and there? Why this “I will show you” business? It’s so frustrating! But God knows us too well. He knows that if we had the plan and the place, we’d try to get there without him. Just ask Abraham. And we need God far more than we need the plan and the place. Though severe, it’s a mercy when he lets us grow weary and dry up inside. For then we come back to him. Just ask Abraham.

That’s why we pray. And that’s why we get so exhausted when we don’t. For when we lose him who is the Way we lose the way.

What a friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and griefs to bear;
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit,
O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer.
Are we weak and heavy laden,
Cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Savior, still our refuge;
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Do thy friends despise, forsake thee?
Take it to the Lord in prayer;
In His arms he’ll take and shield thee,
Thou wilt find a solace there.
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