Avoiding missionary preparation burnout
Burnout is a real possibility as you travel the road to full-time missionary service, which often takes more than six years. Listen to one couple talk about sticking to your goal despite the long road.
Avoiding missionary preparation burnout
We have been working towards being involved in missions aviation engineering for about half a dozen years now.
Six years or so.
A couple of years ago, we have a semester where Chester took a fuller schedule than he could really handle. And we had just moved to Lincoln, we had three little babies, and Chester had to be gone from 7 or 8 a.m. ’til midnight every single night, studying. And, we felt like it killed us. And we’ve seen a lot of people have hard experiences like that, and they fall off, at that point, when they realize, The way that we’re approaching this, it’s just not worth it.
And we’ve found that, a lot of times, a shift in perspective is really all that’s necessary. A little bit of flexibility, and saying, Well, we’re going to do things differently. We’re not going to change our goal, but we’re going to find a way to do what God’s laid on our hearts in a way that we can live with.
So for us, instead of abandoning the goal, which is what we’ve seen happen in a lot of situations, we said, We need to change how we do things. And now, instead of Chester going to school full-time and working part-time, now Chester goes to school less, and I work, which gives me a chance to get out of the house and gives Chester more time with the kids, and it just ends up a lot more doable schedule.
Credits:
Produced by Mission Data International
Video Editor: Kyle McCarthy
Cameraman: Paul Nielsen
Creative Commons Copyright
2008 Mission Data International
Some rights reserved
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 9:07 am and is filed under Burnout, Perseverance, Perspective from the Pipeline. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.