R. Loren Sandford - Renewal for the Wounded Warrior: A Burnout Survival Guide for Believers

Contained within these pages is wisdom for your lifes journey and lessons in the fear of the Lordsome of the best medicine anyone can receive. So take a spoonful of the Fathers love and then chew and swallow the meat in this book, some gut-level truths that might just save your life.

from the foreword by James W. Goll, Encounters Network,
Compassion Acts, Prayer Storm; author, The Seer,
The Coming Prophetic Revolution, The Lost Art of
Practicing His Presence and many others

My first encounter with Loren Sandford came during a personal crisis in my life. I was experiencing burnout from ministry and had no one at that time with whom I felt safe sharing my feelings. Someone handed me a copy of Lorens book on burnout in ministry. This book helped me find the peace I was looking for while dealing with the emotional struggle I faced in co-pioneering an international ministry with my husband, Jack, a totally performance-driven burnout minister himself. Lorens transparency and willingness to open up his personal struggles with this issue gave me the courage I needed to seek healing and not become another casualty of ministry. I recommend this book, and feel that if ever there was a required reading list for ministers, this book should be on the list.

Trisha Frost, co-founder/president, Shiloh Place
Ministries

Loren has been there; he knows that people in burnout have little energy to wade through complex prose or heed smug advice. Although this book is incredibly rich and deep, better yet it is an easy read and is user friendly.

Mark Sandford, spiritual director, Elijah House U.S.A.

RENEWAL
FOR THE
WOUNDED
WARRIOR

A Burnout Survival Guide for Believers

R. LOREN SANDFORD

2010 by R. Loren Sandford

Published by Chosen Books
A division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.chosenbooks.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sandford, R. Loren.
Renewal for the wounded warrior : a burnout survival guide for believers / R. Loren Sandford.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8007-9480-4 (pbk.)
1. Burn out (Psychology)Religious aspectsChristianity. I. Title.
BV4509.5.S264 2010
248.86dc22

2009034827

Unless otherwise noted Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible, copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to my faithful and loving wife who stood by me without complaint through all the long years, patiently waiting for the changes God had promised in me. Her relentlessly positive nature and unwavering devotion to the Lord comprise a major portion of what has made this book possible.

CONTENTS

Sometimes before you can get the right answer, you have to ask the right question. But often in todays instant success, fast food, pseudo-Christian, churchianity society, we are afraid even to admit we have a problem, let alone ask the right question. Sometimes we live in the longest river of the world: Denile.

Ever get the cart ahead of the horse? Put doing ministry ahead of ministering to the Lord? Come to the realization that you are serving the promotion of your own ministry instead of having an honest-to-God real relationship with your Maker and Creator?

I wont take a poll on that one, for if the truth be known, we have all walked down that path in one season or another. Some of us have not watched the gauges on the car and the oil light has been glaring at us for some timeglaring bright red until our vehicle comes to a full stop. Then its push time. Yep, push the vehicle to make it seem as if we are still going somewhere.

Each of us needs to learn to take an honest assessment of our lives, our fruit, our expenditure. Jesus called it counting the cost before building the tower. I call it living in reality.

Do you think I know what I am talking about? Yes. Like you, I am still on a learning curve and need the help of others to point me in the right direction.

But help is on the way. God wants us to live a whole lifeto be healed and to be holy. Many tools are coming together in our day in an integrated healing approach to life and ministry. One of these new tools is the book you hold in your hand.

Writing in a transparent style, R. Loren Sandford brings you lessons he has learned as the son of forerunners John Loren and Paula Sandford. Loren adds insights from his own experience, his own mistakes and his own revelation on this greatly overlooked subject.

So lets turn some lights on. Lets learn to yield the right of way to the wisdom of Gods ways. Lets discover when to rebuke the enemy, when to stand firmand yes, when to rest. At this time in my life, the Holy Spirit has spoken to me that my highest weapon is rest. Now lets all rest. We will attempt to twist Gods arm to find the newest recipe to rest. Right?

No, it does not work that way. True rest is a Person. Resting in the everlasting arms of my Belovedthat is my cure and my key. What is yours?

Contained within these pages is wisdom for your lifes journey and lessons in the fear of the Lordsome of the best medicine anyone can receive. So take a spoonful of the Fathers love and then chew and swallow the meat in this book: some gut-level truths that might just save your life.

Warning: The contents of this book are healthy for the soul and will bring healing to the whole body. In fact, a new creation is about to occur!

In the trenches with you,

James W. Goll
Encounters Network / Compassion Acts / Prayer Storm
author of The Seer, The Coming Prophetic Revolution,
The Lost Art of Practicing His Presence and many others

For the last several decades burnout has been a much discussed and little understood condition both in the Christian world and outside of it. Help has focused largely on effecting remedial behavioral and lifestyle changes when pressures have spun out of control, but too little emphasis has been placed on the incapacity of the burnout victim to make those changes. Much of what has been written has therefore been of little real help to those whose experience has left them both deeply wounded and marginally functional.

Up to a point, behavioral changes can help restore strength and enable a wounded one to continue in labor, life and ministry. For many of us, however, the truth is that behavioral changes do not helpeven when we have the strength to make themand that burnout serves only to soften us up for the deeper things God really has in store. Burnout can actually serve a helpful function in breaking through denial systems and structures of performance built over a lifetime to protect roots of wounding, fears and strongholds acquired so early in life that we rarely consciously recognize their presence. In my personal experience I recovered from burnout and enjoyed two good years of restored vitality only to discover that the real work had yet to begin by means of a wilderness experience neither I nor anyone around me understood.