From Burnout to Bliss: Reclaiming Your Life One Step at a Time

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You feel like everything is a weight and there's a fatigue and mentally you don't know if you're coming or going.

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If that's you, then you may be burnt out.

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And this episode is for you.

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This is the unshakable life.

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Mindset, resilience, action.

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No strife.

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Break free from the burnout.

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Find your true north with your God.

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Jim Burn stepping forward.

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This is the unshakable life.

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Hey, friends.

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Welcome back to the show.

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I'm so glad you're here.

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Today we're going to be talking about recognizing and recovering from burnout.

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Now, this is something I see in church, in entrepreneurship, in life in general.

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When we work hard, we keep working and we get stuck in the hustle and grind mode.

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But then we forget to take care of ourselves and then we end up in this place of extreme exhaustion where our mind is screaming enough, our emotions are saying I'm done.

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And our mental state, that's questionable at times.

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And each one of us have to deal with the ramifications of burnout.

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Especially when you get stuck in hustle culture, when you're trying to keep up with everything around you, when you're trying to make the business go off or lead the team or do the ministry or whatever you're doing.

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And we're not taking that time for self care because here's the reality of the situation.

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Most of us live in what I like to call functional burnout.

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And this is where you can go do the motions and then you come home and crash.

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This is where you can show up and you can smile and you can do all the things, but on the inside you feel empty.

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And that's what we're talking about here today.

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We on the Unshakable Life, because it's a problem, because it's a pervasive problem that I see that is increasing.

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And we have to wrestle with a question.

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Is this feeling of burnout, is this a result of a poor or a lack of boundaries?

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Or is it just that I'm not in the presence of God like I should be?

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Because if I start putting proper boundaries in place, if I start getting in the presence of God, I'll become more aware of, of what's going on inside of me.

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Because remember, and I think I've said this in the past episode, we don't want to be like the car where we see the check light engine come on and we ignore it until it's too late.

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We've got to stop doing that.

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Because I'm going to tell you, if you ignore what you're feeling, eventually what you're feeling will become the reality that you live it.

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And psychologically speaking, burnout happens because prolonged stress, we don't deal with stress properly, we don't do self care properly.

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Listen, if you do self care and self care means zoning out, you're not self care.

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You're distracting yourself from the problem.

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Because we got to stop distracting ourselves from the problem and start dealing with it.

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Because if you're anything like me, distraction only goes so far before your body decides to quit on you.

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And my body quit on me.

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I was never able to maintain.

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And this came from trauma I didn't deal with.

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It caused over functioning.

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It caused me to want to hide more, to be perfect in what I do.

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Because one thing I know is that when your body begins to shut down, it's starting to tell you something has to change.

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And if you don't change it, it's going to get worse.

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And we don't want the catastrophic failure.

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We want healing, we want health, we want wholeness.

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And we want to live in God's blessing and do the things that we're called to do.

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But we can't if we're stuck in the cycle of hustle culture and we're in over functioning.

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And then we decide that it's more important to over function and people please than it is to take care of ourselves.

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Thus we end up in functional burnout and some of us end up in hospitalization burnout.

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And all of this stems from a lack of boundaries or poor boundaries or what we think are boundaries, but aren't truly boundaries.

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Because we grew up in an unhealthy way, because we grew up with trauma, because we grew up with this overreaching expectations.

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We see boundaries as selfish, self centered, the unspiritual.

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And that's not the case.

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But let's talk about Jesus for a second.

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He's our biblical model.

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He rested, he withdrew often, he left crowds in order to go pray, he slept in the middle of a storm and talk about stress management.

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And if this is our biblical model, there are proper ways and boundaries in order to handle the stress so that we don't lead it to burnout.

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But the reality comes back to if you do what's right for your health, you'll be able to do what God wants you to do.

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So we have to understand that we need the boundaries, proper boundaries that are enforced to become healthy enough to stand up against the stress that that leads us to burnout.

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Now if we've already been to the Place where you feel like you're in burnout.

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Let's talk about recovery for a second.

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Because recovery is more than just resting.

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You can't rest your way out of burnout.

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What you need, what I need it and what I'm working on and what I'm going to encourage you to work on is retraining your nervous system when you've been in stress for too long.

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The fight or flight situation.

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Some of us who, like I'm diagnosed with CPTSD and because of some childhood stuff, so my nervous system was fried for most of my life.

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So for me to overcome a lot of my burnout, I've had to constantly retrain my nervous system to know what's safe and what isn't safe.

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Not what it told me wasn't safe, but what is actually safe and what is actually unsafe.

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And when I started doing that, I started seeing health rise.

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And if you are going to be somebody who wants to see your health come up or your life change in a proper way, then we need to partner with the Holy Spirit to say how can we retrain our nervous systems to determine what is really safe and what is not safe so that we can get into a place of managing stress, not living in constant flight or flight or fight all the time, but that we can be out of the fight or flight and walk in that grace.

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So I want to give you a four part framework real quick on just how to recover.

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Number one is recognize.

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And what we're recognizing are the warning signs.

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The emotional numbness, the irritability, the loss of passion, the detachment, the depression, the disp, the spiritual dryness.

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All of these things we need to start recognizing.

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Now I'm going to tell you women, it's easier for you to recognize than men.

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Men, we need to get better at recognizing our emotional emptiness.

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Women, maybe we you can help us recognize that and check in on us.

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Men, we need to help women slow down and say they don't have to do it all themselves.

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We work in partnership in tandem with one another.

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But irregardless, we need to start recognizing the warning signs.

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Number two, we need to release.

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Now, there are two things we need to release.

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The first one, we need to release our need to fulfill others expectations.

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Others expectations on you are not your problem.

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It is their problem.

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You are not the savior.

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You are just a servant.

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Now with that being said, we like to people please our way into helping everyone.

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We think that because we showed up that everybody's going to be okay, that everything's going to be okay.

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And all that's going to be good.

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That's not the case.

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A lot of people need the Savior, they don't need you.

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And if we still can come serve, but we got to follow the, the leading of the Holy Spirit to serve in the way that we serve best in the proper context.

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Because there are.

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We don't need to show up for everybody all the time, but we need to be empathetic and compassionate and prayerful in where to show up, where to give our time and energy in proper ways that's going to help and bring God's glory and not hurt you thinking that you are the Savior because you are not.

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The second thing we have to release is our own expectations.

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We live because of our trauma.

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We live at such a high level of expectation and that it borderlines like clinical perfectionism.

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Like we have to be so perfect.

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And a lot of times we, we get ourselves out of God's blessing because we are trying to be so perfect that we miss the windows of opportunity.

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So we need to release others expectation on us and we need to at least release that high expectation on us, on ourselves, and lower it to a reasonable standard that we can actually accomplish.

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Now, number three is rest.

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And yeah, you're going to be like, Jim, I thought you said you can't rest your way to this.

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And you can't because it is going to be retraining your nervous system.

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But let's do a both end here rest.

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Because we're going to need times of silence.

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What happens in the silence?

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We journal, we retrain, we sit with ourselves, we deal with the things we've been hiding.

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We sit there and we take solitude.

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Because a lot of times we do need to deal with this in our own thoughts, by ourselves, so that we can hear God and in the midst of it, and then we can take it to others.

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Then there's the thing where we need to find the soul's rhythm, not to rush, to slow down, to find our Sabbath.

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Because we do need to take these places of stillness, these places with the presence of the Holy Spirit that says, okay, God, I'm going to rest in you.

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But resting is never inactive.

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Resting is a verb.

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I'm going to rest in you.

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Oh God.

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And, and in that rest, you're going to teach me what I need to change, who I need to become and how I can prevent coming to this place again.

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And number four, you're going to rebuild.

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Now rebuilding is the stage where you're going to start really defining your boundaries.

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You're going to start really enforcing your boundaries.

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And then, because what you're doing is you're creating structure for health.

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You're creating structure that's going to lead you to God's presence.

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Not in back into hustle culture.

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You don't go back to what broke you, go to what heals you.

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Because even in the Bible, God knows that we are just all over the place.

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God knows that we're going to be in our hustle culture.

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Well, how do you know that?

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Psalm 23, it says this.

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He makes us lie down in green pasture.

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He leads us beside still waters.

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He restores our soul.

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Now this whole thing, I like this because it says he makes us lie down because we are stubborn sheep who oftentimes will not lie down.

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And if we don't lie down, he makes us lie down.

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And I want you to hear that because we have a savior who will do what needs to be done in order to increase our health.

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But just as real talk, I think we'll actually learn to rest when we realize that rest isn't optional.

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Because biblically speaking, we don't fight for rest, we fight from rest.

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And when we realize that resting is obedience, resting is not optional.

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We'll rest easier and we'll actually enjoy and look for the rest.

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But until we get that little picture that rest isn't optional, I think we're going to continually fight this with our own little attitudes and our rebellious that says, God, I got this.

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I don't need nobody.

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But the reality is that attitude is what gets us to burnout.

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That attitude keeps us in burnout.

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And if we want to change and actually get out to a healthier place and experience the joy that you're missing right now, then we have to say, God, you've got this.

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Show me how to partner with you.

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And partnering with Jesus comes to a final thought.

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Burnout recovery isn't about running away from responsibilities.

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It's about returning to relationship because it's about the presence of God.

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And we're about to return to the relationship with God.

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So we're not running because the antidote to burnout is not a vacation.

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Matter of fact, if you're anything like me, you probably are tired from your vacation.

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And that was supposed to be the thing to rejuvenate you.

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But it's about presence.

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And you know, the Bible tells us in a couple different place.

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As a matter of fact, Jesus himself tells us.

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He says, come to me all ye who will weary and burden, and I will give you rest.

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And he's like, yo, when you need Rest, Come to me, and I will give it to you.

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You know, there's other places, like Psalm 23 we mentioned, but then there's like Nehemiah, it says, the joy of the Lord is my strength.

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Then we go over to Psalms, well, where do we find the joy of the Lord?

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We find the joy of the Lord in the presence of God.

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So we understand that when we're in the presence of God, not only do we get joy, that joy becomes our strength.

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And then in the midst of God giving us strength, he also gives us rest.

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But it all comes back to getting in the presence of God.

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And your healing starts when you realize that you're not broken and you don't need to be fixed.

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But what we need to do is realign ourselves with the presence of God, because that's who fills us up and heals us.

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Because remember, we're not to be fixed, we're to be healed.

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We're not to be, like, suddenly put together again.

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We're be.

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We're to be made whole.

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And these are very powerful con concepts and very powerful truths when you get a hold of them.

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Because when you start getting honest with God about your struggles, about where you are, and you give him permission to speak to you, and then you give yourself perm mission to be human again, healing is inevitable.

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So remember, if you're at a place today where you feel numb and I'm.

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You feel tired, and I don't mean the tire.

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That means if you take a nap, it feels great.

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I'm talking about the tire that no nap is going to fix.

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If you feel resentful, if you feel like you've missed God's calling, if you feel like he's abandoning you, please hear this.

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You are not broken.

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You've not.

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You're not forgotten.

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God even tells us he's never going to leave nor forsake us.

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We just have to call out to Him.

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And I encourage you to do that today.

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I encourage you to go back to your closet, you know, the secret place or whatever that looks like for you, and just reach back out to God and say, God, I am broken.

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Not broken that needs to be fixed, but that you're just emotionally a wreck, that you're.

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You're trying to hold it all together, but you feel like it's all falling apart.

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And I think that's where God wants us.

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A lot of times when everything is falling apart, we run to him to realize he's the person that holds it all together.

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When we don't have the strength to do it ourselves.

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So take a breath.

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Understand this is a process, not a destination.

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Get back in your closet and just breathe again and breathe in the presence of God.

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Thank you for spending this time with me on the Unshakable Life podcast.

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My prayer is that today's conversation helps you to be build resilience, reclaim peace and step with courage into your God given calling.

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If this episode has encouraged you, challenged you, or impacted you in any way, could you do me a favor?

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Share it with a friend, leave a review and hit the follow so you don't miss what's next.

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And if you want more tools and encouragement for your journey, head over to leadwithjim.com you'll find resources to help you grow as a healthy, authentic Christian leader, entrepreneur and creator.

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And until next time, remember your foundation is Christ, your calling is unshakable, and your life can make eternal impact.

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This is the Unshakable Life Mindset Resilience Action no stride Break free from the burnout.

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Find your true north with your guy Jim Burger stepping forward.

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This is the Unshakable Life.