‘I’m running on empty’. Not words you want to hear from anyone involved in pas-toral care.
Not the words you want to say if you are someone who supports others in pain. But many of us have sighed that phrase. Life is busy, ministry is hard, health struggles are real and family stresses don’t ebb away just because that email saying ‘please can we meet again asap’ pops into our inbox. So what should we do? Stoically press on while suppressing that sense we have nothing to offer? Give up and leave the care to others around? Or is there a better way?
Never just running on fumes
Maybe the place to start is reminding ourselves that, as Christians, we can never be truly empty. We can be exhausted, exas-perated and at the end of our tethers, but we can’t be empty. We’re sealed with the Holy Spirit – our bodies are a temple of the Lord Himself – and if He is at work within us, we will always have something to offer others: Him! That means that even on our hardest of days we can point people to Jesus and do so confident that it will make a difference to the person who’s struggling nearby.
