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Tuesday, January 9, 2018

The Way of Wilderness

A few km east of Santander, Spain
Authors note:  After a period of sporadic engagement with this blog, I'm back.  I begin with a series of thoughts and reflections stemming from my sabbatical experience in 2017.  For part of the sabbatical I took a (very) long walk to rest, rejuvenate and relax after a period of burnout.  That walk was on the Camino del Norte in Northern Spain.  281 Km in 15 days along the mountainous coast along the Bay of Biscay.  Though I was still in the dry and cracked personal and leadership wilderness, I encountered the incredible beauty of this natural wilderness...and found Jesus waiting for me there.

If you have not yet walked into a personal wilderness, you will.

My story:

I WAS DONE.

For 34+ years I  have been a Christian ministry leader in Canada and around the world.  I thought I was resilient and indefatigable, but I had reached a breaking point.  For many reasons I found myself in a new landscape - a dry, barren wilderness of mind, soul and body.  I told my ministry board in Feb of 2017 : "I am done.  I'm exhausted physically & emotionally. While I can still 'see' into the future of this ministry, I am completely disconnected.  Professionally I can still perform, but its like I am having an out of body experience each time I speak or serve.  I can do it, but I am an autobotI can't go on and I don't know what to do".

With that I declared my leadership bankruptcy.  I had no plan of what to do. The first and only act I knew to do at that point was finally admit it.  Yet it took a long time.  I am fiercely independent and a 'press on' kind of guy, so this was a monumental admission.  There was no plan on my part for what was next, but I knew if I didn't take the first step of personal acknowledgement, I truly was 'done'.  Time to exit ministry and maybe even faith. It was that bad.

My board graciously granted me (and worked hard to provide) a 3 month sabbatical.  I owe them a great deal.  To my board - if you are reading this - I am humbled and indebted to your faith and courage to make this happen.  I know it wasn't easy organizationally. You did the right thing.

Image result for leadership wilderness
On my flight from Canada to start the El Camino in Spain I started reading Eugene Petersen's "The Jesus Way".  How serendipitous.  "El Camino" in Spanish means "The Way".  One quote pierced into my personal situation:

"Wilderness time.  Desert time.  Time to see the way of Jesus tested against the devils' way.  Time to  feel the terrible pull of temptation away from Jesus' way and realize it is a temptation to embrace illusion and to believe a lie.  Time to become aware of the immense and hidden abyss between the way of Jesus and the way of Satan." (pg 30).

Jesus was deliberately tested in a wilderness to determine if He would choose to act according to the ways of His Father or the way offered by Satan (Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 4). Jesus, the Son of God was led into a wilderness experience.  Did you read that correctly?  He was led into it.  A wilderness.  Deliberately.  By God. I emphasize these things because while at times I beat myself up for ever getting to the point of burnout and 'wilderness', my experience was not beyond the purposeful intentions of God for my testing and maturing.

On the road of leadership are tests.  Often wilderness is the context where God administers those tests.  In the wilderness you are stripped down to the essentials.  Survival becomes paramount.  What's most important comes into a focus you likely have never before experienced, because your very survival depends on that level of clarity.

My wilderness experience was a time to feel at a core level just how much I had embraced the illusion and lie that personal leadership skill and effort was the means to accomplish the mission of God in this world. I had plunged into the abyss between the way of Jesus and the way of Satan.

Jesus is our 'Camino'. He is our Way.  Jesus as the Way also means that the ways of Jesus are a part of the Way.  Once you have abandoned doing things according to His ways, you have succumbed to an illusion and believed the lie of Satan.  Over time, I had developed my own 'way' - driving to the ends according to my own means.  My ways were respectable and frankly, a reflection of  Western Christian leadership culture and expectations. Optically it all looked good.  The industry of Christian leadership training & seminars would affirm my approaches.  People went along with my tactics.  However, behind this illusion was a self-determined striving that lead to cynicism, emotional distance and a soul-sucking emptiness as a Christian leader.  When you live in contradiction to the Jesus way, even while trying to serve His purposes, those are the results.

Are you headed for a wilderness?  Are you already in one?  At the risk of over simplification, I offer  4 starting thoughts for your wilderness journey.

  1. Don't beat yourself up over it.  Jesus is there and He is intending to test you.  Surrender to the lessons that will confront you.
  2. Be courageous and admit where you are. Stop 'sucking it up' and plowing forward. You can do it for a while but at some point you will implode.  Your mind, body and soul were not built for that level of stress.  Something is gonna give.
  3. Confront your fears around vulnerability and tell someone. I told my wife before anyone else, but she saw it long before I admitted it.  It was also hard, but necessary to eventually tell those who shared leadership with me.
  4. Surrender any sense of control over what's next.  You are likely in this place because of control issues.  Jesus' full intent is to shift control from you to Him. (That truth easily rolls off our preacher-tongues.  It does not so easily show up in our daily service to the Master).
Much more to come...I'd love to interact with you if this is useful to you. Sign up for this blog to get regular updates, leave a comment or contact me personally at hbmatch@gmail.com

Harv Matchullis
...still leading, but from a different posture... 

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