What's Stressing You Out?

Yesterday, I was asked a question about staying healthy in ministry over the long-haul.  Basically the question was, 'what have been the keys to dealing with stress and sustaining personal health in ministry over the past 20+ years of your life?'

There are two sources of stress:

EXTERNAL STRESSORS - some of these things can can attempt to control - our schedule, our pace, our priorities.  Some of these things we cannot control - our circumstances, the response of the people around us, the impact of events and happenings in our world.  There are some keys to managing external stressors:

• Learning good time management skills.
• Scheduling in a date nite, exercise, family time.
• Keeping a sabbath (a day set aside unto God every week).
• Developing a consistent devotional habit.
• Learning what and how to delegate & how to manage people and systems.

INTERNAL STRESSORS - my sense is that it is the internals not the externals that stress us out the most -

• What we believe about ourselves and about God
• How we process criticism, failure, perceived rejection
• Learning how to choose joy in the midst of trials
• Giving ourselves time to grieve when loss happens in our life
• Being able to forgive ourselves when we fail and access God's forgiveness
• Maintaining purity and accountability so that we are not unnecessarily weighed down by guilt and sin

The first ten years of my ministry I worked primarily on trying to master the management of the EXTERNALS - but I never really worked through some of the stress on the inside.  Several years back after the stress in my life caused boughts with migraines - I took the time and did the work to deal with the INTERNAL sources of my stress.

Both are necessary.  But I think my choice to rigorously deal with what was going on - on the inside has produced in me a greater degree of peace and the capacity for sustainability over the long-haul.  I say that with an awareness that this is something that you can never stop paying attention to and must continually depend on God for his sustaining grace.

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