Before we sold our minivan upon moving from Africa, my husband and I totaled up how many times we’d been hit.

The grand total: 16. 

(That’s not us doing the hitting, to be clear.)

But there was more trauma, too. There was the time we were robbed. The time my husband got malaria. The time I was in a car accident with a fatality.

At one point I felt like I was so tired of all the pain and the work just to live overseas that I understood why people became wizened and dried up as they grew older. My soul felt like it was living in dog-years–seven years for every single year lived on the field.

Spiritually feeding those around me sometimes felt it required scraping out the inside of my own ribs with a spoon.

But though some seasons require temporary exhaustion—like my dad experienced, as a farmer in planting or harvest—I don’t think Scripture supports burnout as a norm or the signs of a fruitful longevity. I don’t think Jesus was the most burned-out guy to walk the earth. 

But also, “It is absolutely vital to remember that a pastor’s [or global worker’s] ministry is never just shaped by his knowledge, experience, and skill. It is always also shaped by the true condition of his heart,” writes Paul David Tripp in Dangerous Calling.

It can be our hearts, followed by our ministry, which pay that toll of perpetual exhaustion. The work we began in God’s name could easily hack away at our souls. 

When it comes to Jesus as the Vine, sometimes my fruit is about as one-dimensional and stick-on as a VBS flannelgraph. Allow me to state this a bit more starkly: My capability–through gifting and muscle–to fake passion, love for others, or worship should scare the tar out of me. 

Without connection to Jesus as Vine and Source, I got nothin’.

Exhausted in ministry, we can end up preaching to ourselves–and subtly, our field–a false gospel: We are really saved, really worth something, that God is really pleased with us, not because of Jesus’ worth and Jesus’ work, but by what we do.

That Jesus really loves you if you’re burnt to a crisp.

Rest gives wholeness to our ministry. It helps us love God and others sincerely (Romans 12:9; recall 1 Corinthians 13: “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”). Rest restates that we are not slaves, but sons (Romans 8:15).