How to Love Others Without Burning Out
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash.
Sometimes I lay awake in bed at night and feel overwhelmed by the needs of others around me. The double edge sword of relationships or being connected in a local community, is that while there is connection and support, there’s also an unending flow of suffering and hardship others need help with. Or sometimes it’s me that needs the help from others.
We exist in the in-between time. The already but not yet. The time after Christ’s coming: his birth, death, resurrection, and ascension - but we still live under the power and influence of sin and death.
Paul in the letter of Romans refers to it as a “time of groaning” as we wait for Christ’s second coming whereby our bodies will be made new without pain, weakness, and suffering (Romans 8:22).
We groan. We are sick. Our bodies break down. Our relationships with others are fractured. Our world is filled with evil and destruction.
And yet, God has left us to care for “one another” in this time of waiting until Christ returns and defeats sin, death, brokenness, and pain.
God calls us to:
Love one another (John 13:34)
Be devoted to one another (Romans 12:10)
Honour one another above yourselves (Romans 12:10)
Live in harmony with one another (Romans 12:16)
Build up one another (1 Thessalonians 5:11)
Be likeminded toward one another (Romans 15:5)
Accept one another (Romans 15:7)
Admonish one another (Colossians 3:16)
Greet one another (Romans 16:16)
Care for one another (1 Corinthians 12:25)
Serve one another (Galatians 5:13)
Bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2)
Forgive one another (Ephesians 4:2)
Be patient with one another (Ephesians 4:2)
Speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15)
Be kind and compassionate with one another Ephesians 4:32)
Submit to one another (Ephesians 5:21)
Consider others better than yourselves (Philippians 2:3)
Look to the interests of one another (Philippians 2:4)
Teach one another (Colossians 3:16)
Comfort one another (1 Thessalonians 4:18)
Encourage one another (1 Thessalonians 5:11)
Exhort one another (Hebrews 3:13)
Show hospitality to one another (1 Peter 4:9)
Pray for one another (James 5:16)
Confess your faults to one another (James 5:16)
This is not an exhaustive list.
Does reading this list fill you with encouragement and inspiration? Or overwhelm because you know the limits of your physical, emotional, and spiritual capabilities fall short of caring for others the way God exhorts us to?
I often feel the tension of my human limitations rub against the needs of others and my own (often good) desires to meet those needs.
The tension around how to help and support well can also rub against our need to self protect. We can sometimes feel like we are trying to save someone who is drowning and yet we don’t want to be pulled down into the depths of the ocean with them.
These tensions can lead to the temptation to not help others at all.
“That’s not my problem to take on.”
“Why should I carry their burden?”
“I have enough going on in my life.”
“Someone else can help them, I don’t know what to do.”
“If I step in it’ll cause more chaos and problems.”
“I don’t want to make their sufferings worse.”
I have been tempted with such thoughts and beliefs. And yet, how many times have others entered my mess to sit with me, pray with me, encourage me, exhort me, and support me through tough and painful seasons?
Too many times to count.
God works to offer me comfort through the love and support of others. In turn, the comfort I receive from God I then turn around and offer to others.
Paul speaks to this comfort from God, turned comfort to others in 2 Corinthians 1:1-7,
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share in Christ’s sufferings so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are confronted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.”
More than just sharing comfort, there is a sharing of suffering between believers - sharing also in the sufferings and comfort of Christ.
As we bear with one another we are called to share in both suffering and comfort.
But how do we bear with others in their struggles and groaning without being overcome ourselves? Is this possible or realistic?
Care, not carry
I really appreciated the words of Jess Connolly in a recent Substack post “Numb No More: Care, Don’t Carry”.
Jess writes:
“we’ve blurred the lines between compassion and control. We start out wanting to love people well, but somewhere along the way, we begin picking up weight that was never ours to hold. We don’t just sit with people in pain - we try to rescue them from it. We don’t just listen - we absorb. We confuse empathy with ownership.”
And:
“We are invited, commanded, even - to help others with the crushing stuff. But we’re not meant to take on their daily work, their internal processing, or the burdens God has specifically assigned to them. Each of us has our own pack to carry.”
Wow. That helpful delineation between caring well alongside someone and carrying something only God has entrusted to them was so helpful for me.
God invites us to “one another” each other. We can come alongside and do all of the things listed above (ideally as part of a community in a local church), without burdening ourselves with the full responsibility of whatever the other person is facing.
We can care but not be consumed.
The Gospel frees us to care
And the reason WHY we don’t need to be consumed and carry the load that others have on their behalf is because they already have a Saviour whose done just that. I don’t need to be their Saviour - I can keep pointing them to the one who not only CARES for them but already CARRIED the weight of what they face on the cross.
On the cross Jesus was consumed by the weight of their sin and suffering. This practically allows me to come alongside to “one another” and extend love, grace, support, and comfort while releasing the weight of their burdens to the Lord Jesus who was wounded so that they may be healed (1 Peter 2:24). It’s Jesus that offers healing. It’s Jesus that offers redemption from sin. It’s Jesus that offers truth and conviction, mercy and kindness. I can partner with him in that work as I seek to love and serve others, but I’m not their Saviour to carry the load of their sin and suffering.
This is remarkably hard for me. I tend to have a heavy sense of responsibility for those entrusted to me, whether my family or even subordinates in the workplace. I’m tempted to take too much ownership of another person’s journey seeking to control their outcomes. But what God has entrusted them, and carried the weight of on the cross, is theirs. It’s not mine.
What I can do is release it all back to God in prayer and surrender. I can try my best, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to love and care for others, while knowing that Jesus carries the weight of it all so that I don’t have to. It would be impossible for me to! In fact, it was enough to crush Jesus into death and darkness.
But the weight of it all didn’t keep him in the grave, he overcame it and rose again – and though we now live in a time of groaning, it won’t last forever. We too will be set free from the bondage of sin and brokenness and death one day.
John in Revelation 21:3-4 writes:
“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
Jesus promises to wipe away all our tears. He will dwell with us and be with us forever. Death and sin will be defeated. Sickness and pain will be gone. No more grief, loss, or brokenness.
But until that day: we hold on. We press into loving each other. We ask the Holy Spirit for supernatural help in the work of caring for others. And we keep entrusting and surrendering the weight of that work to our Lord Jesus who carried both ours and others burdens on the cross.
Let us be free to love each other then in faith.