When Burnout Becomes an Invitation

The following is based on a conversation with Gordie Lagore on the SoulStream Living from the Heart podcast.

There comes a moment in many of our lives when we begin to sense that striving is no longer helping us. What once felt necessary now feels heavy, even harmful. The strategies that carried us for years start to lose their life. We pray, we work, we serve, and yet something within us grows tired. Not just busy-tired, but a deeper weariness that tells us something needs to change.

This conversation with Gordie reminded me again that love is not the reward for a faithful life. Love is the beginning. It’s the foundation for life. Long before we choose God, God has already chosen us. Long before we strive, we are already held. Spiritual direction doesn’t present us with new answers as much as it gently guides us along the path from our minds to our hearts, where we can finally rest.

“The false self…is simply a substitute for our deepest truth. It is a gratifying self‑image that works for a while, but it is not our essence, and it will finally exhaust itself.”

Richard Rohr, True Self/Separate Self, Sunday, August 30, 2020

It seems like when burnout arrives, we sometimes interpret it as weakness or failure. It may be grace, albeit an uncomfortable kind of grace. When the false self exhausts itself, the true self is finally allowed to emerge and breathe. What feels like falling apart may actually be an invitation into a more compassionate and humane way of living.

Jesus never treats rest as a failure of faith. He steps away to pray because he knows that intimacy with his Father, not constant activity, is what sustains love and life.

“It is in this solitude that we discover that being is more important than having, and that we are worth more than the result of our efforts.”

Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

Solitude and silence play an essential role here. They reveal what constant activity conceals. In solitude and silence, we discover how busy we have been avoiding Reality. We also discover that God has never been absent. Love has been patiently waiting to embrace us beneath the noise.

None of this work was meant to be done alone. We need companions who listen without fixing, who notice with us, and who trust the Spirit already at work within. Healing deepens and takes root when we are seen with grace and tenderness. That’s the power of spiritual direction or simply a friend who knows how to listen without fixing.

“The contemplatives say there is a level at which all our hearts are always saying yes to love, regardless of how dulled or preoccupied our conscious minds are.”

Gerald May, The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need

The heart doesn’t respond to information the way the mind does. It responds to presence, practice, and compassion. When we repeatedly say “yes” to love, it takes root in our hearts. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, we begin to live from the place where we are already loved.