Mar 15, 2024 |
WLSU, No Self Improvement
| The Rev. Philip DeVaul
WLSU, No Self Improvement
There’s a moment in The Lord of the Rings where a character stops to consider how he feels, and then describes himself as “stretched thin – like butter scraped over too much bread.” That’s it. That’s what I feel like. It’s not quite burnout. I’m not looking out the window for something else to do. Rather, my body and spirit are tired, and have been and keep being, and I am looking for rest and renewal.
One thing I can tell you about being butter scraped over too much bread is that sometimes when everything is going well, you’re not able to feel the joy and excitement of it. You can intellectually recognize that things are great, but not have the capacity to appreciate that reality.
Another thing that happens is a bandwidth problem. During the height (or depth) of the pandemic, there was a point when both my wife and I were working from home, and all three kids were home with us. The oldest two were attending school remotely on their computers, and the youngest was too young even for school and spent a lot of time on a screen. I’m not going to bother trying to explain or defend that. Anyway, when we were all online at the same time, we would sometimes have a bandwidth issue – our internet would be overloaded and everything would slow down. Since the pandemic, I have noticed myself having bandwidth issues. My internal processing is overwhelmed and everything slows down. If you’ve been around me, maybe you’ve noticed that and maybe you haven’t. I notice it. Butter over too much bread.
I sometimes have difficulty admitting that I feel this way. First, it’s never fun to acknowledge you’re not operating at 100%. We’re programmed to think of that as weakness, and to think of weakness as bad. But also, I worry that the people in my church community – the people with whom I share much of my life – will think I’m saying I’m not happy doing the work. And I’m definitely not saying that.
