Thursday, September 24, 2009
Burnt Toast
This year has been a difficult one for me personally. I have had a turbulent introduction into the politics of a major corporation, being that The Salvation Army is also a Christian movement this has made some of the issues particularly difficult to swallow. The other day I was talking to my wife Peta and she turned to me and said matter of factly, “your burnt toast”! By burnt toast she was implying that I wasn’t so much burnt out, as being burnt out and not really recovering. I have to say that she is right. I wouldn’t say that I am burn out right now or that I’m a shell of the man I was, but there is definitely elements of ‘burnt toast’ about me. It’s interesting that we can at times let people or situations take our peace, joy, passion and compassion. There’s a Psalm that I will paraphrase which talks to God saying in essence, “God, you have allowed my path to become dangerous and me to be consumed by bitterness….But you will restore me.” This is my hope at the moment, for restoration. Despite me being ‘burnt toast’, there is still the capacity within the amazing love and compassion of God to restore me, create in me a clean heart and to renew my spirit. Regardless of the challenges, I have grown as a person and have experienced great joy, with many personal achievements and milestones. I guess that’s like a bit of peanut butter on my burnt toast.
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Hi Troy. I burned out twice. My experience suggests that if you think you are burnt toast then you are probably MUCH more burned than you are aware. We are tough creatures, humans, and those like you, values and vision driven, have enormous capacity to push on, keep giving, endure beyond endurance, but we are not infinite and at some point if the status quo continues we all crumble. My stats are a little dated but 15 years ago there were more trained ministers, in Australia, OUT of their field than working as ministers - they were not out due to career improvements, they were out because the field had chewed them up and spat them out like a lump of useless old gristle.
ReplyDeleteThe Institutional Churches are irrelevant, rancid and cancerous. They will endure for a long time but institutions can endure, the self righteous within them ensure they will, it's a stable self propogating system. That indicates nothing of the presence of the Divine. Unless of course the people within those Churches want to agree that the long term survivial of the institutions of Judaism or Buddhims or Islam therefore prove that God is alive in those institutions as well.
I believe the biblical idea of what to measure was 'fruit'. Anyone without an identity investment in the Institutional Churches can judge their fruit pretty easily.
I'm not going to point it out, if you can see, you can see if you can't yet, then you can't.
The Body has nothing much to do with the thing we name Churches and the way the churches chew up ministers is a perfect illustration of the deeper truth.