Jason Daye 
Welcome to FrontStage Backstage. This week, we have a hand-picked highlight that we believe you will find valuable. If you do, we invite you to listen to the full conversation. You can find the link to the complete episode in the description, as always, please Like, Comment, Subscribe, and Share, so we can continue to bring you meaningful ministry content, helping you, pastors, and ministry leaders, just like you, flourish in both life and leadership. Are you ready? Let's go, Alan. How? How can we kind of process through this idea of, there's always something that can be done in that sense of, you know, I'm called to this, right? You know, I want to, I want to honor God. I want to do my best without that becoming something that's driving us kind of further away from God's best for our lives, right?

Alan Fadling 
Right? Well, the first thing you have to say is, ministry is never done, right? Any kind of caring profession, there will always be someone else with a need. There will always be something that needs a little more attention. There will always be a creative project that you're going to spend another hour on than the number of hours you did, whatever it is. So first of all, you just have to acknowledge that the thing I realized, realized about my anxiety is my anxiety is what my care looks like when God's not very big in the picture. See, when I am frantically worried about this community I lead, or this organization that I've founded, or whatever, my care is huge, and God's care is little. What I'm trying to learn how to do is I do care. I care immensely about the people that God's given me to mentor or to coach or to encourage, God cares more way more. My anxiety flourishes when my awareness of God's present care grows thin. So what I've sometimes said is that really, practically speaking, my worrying, especially my ministry worrying, is a kind of practicing the absence of God instead of practicing the presence of God.

Jason Daye 
Wow, yeah, yeah, that kind of hits the nail on the head. And give us all an opportunity to pause, right? Because when you say that, I mean that's, that's the reality. The reality is, whenever we get so caught up and anxious and really pushing into something, oftentimes, because we're trying to shoulder more of a burden than God's even given us. And the challenge, I think Alan, is that, you know, oftentimes that comes from a really good place, right? Because we do care, like you said, we do care. So how do we how do we balance that idea, that man, we really care about these people, God is entrusted to us. We care about this, this vision, this mission. God is entrusted to us. How do we balance that sense of care without, you know, flipping over the edge or stepping over the edge into, you know, that anxiety-inducing reality that we can find ourselves in, in ministry.

Alan Fadling 
Yeah. So there are probably a number of ways, I think, of one that has been really important for me more recently, and that is to realize that my praying for people is one of the best things I can do for them and for me, when I pray for somebody, when I pray for an event I'm responsible for, when I pray for community, that God's entrusted to my care, when I pray for them, I'm remembering that God is there. I'm asking God to be gracious. I'm recognizing that God is present. I'm not asking him to be present. He's already good at that, right? But I'm recognizing that he's present, that practice suddenly, now, praying for people isn't just a nice thing I do on the side. It's more of an engine for how I continue my right-sized care for the people and the processes that I tend, and that's what I need. That's how I remember that the yoke Jesus invited me to is really well fitting. It is not burdensome. It's not too much for me. Anxiety says it is. And the more I listen to anxiety, like it was some wonderful counselor, like it had great advice for me, really good information about what I should do now and in the near future. The more I do that, the more the burden becomes heavy, the more I think this all lands on me, I mean, and I imagine that somehow God gave me this ministry as this trust that now is just completely landed in my arms. Now I'm the only one who's carrying it. No, the yoke image says Jesus is doing something. Jesus cares about his world. Jesus is good at what he does, and he's very happy to have us join him and what he's responsible for and what he's doing. That's a different vision than I. Sometimes had in the way I've thought about my ministry.

Jason Daye 
Yeah. That's good. That's excellent. Alan, now in your most recent book, Non-Anxious Life, one of the things I really kind of spoke to me as I was reading through it had to do with a few, a few things that you really encourage us to lean deeply into, instead of anxiety, or maybe, you know, as a healing practice beyond anxiety. And I'd like to step through these three different things that you really highlight. You talk about joy, hope, and contentment, right? And when, as I was reading through that Alan, I gotta tell you, I was thinking through ministry, and the idea of, you know, when we launch into ministry, you know, as you know, in the beginning stages, we feel God has called us into something, and there's a lot of joy, there's a lot of hope, there's a lot of contentment, you know, in those early moments, right? Because you're like, Okay, this is it, man, I get to do this, you know, what's what I'm passionate about, what God's called me to. I get to do this, like, for a living, right? I mean, this is amazing. I get to, you know, step into this each and every day, and then we, we run into, you know, kind of the real life, you know, that we run into the fact that we live in a fallen world, and sometimes the joy and the hope and the contentment, all three of those things, in different ways, can be hard to come by, or more challenging first experience. So Alan, can you walk us through each of those and kind of from the perspective of, how does that, you know? How do we lean more deeply into them, and how do they, each, individually, specifically speak into the anxiety that we often carry around with us in ministry.

Alan Fadling 
Yeah, well, let me maybe what I can do is kind of think out loud about those, so, you know, Joy is definitely a fruit of the spirits in the list of nine, contentment, maybe it's implicit, you know, hope, maybe it's implicit. But the thing about joy is joy and peace are very good friends as fellow fruits of the Spirit, like they go together really well. I heard someone recently say that shalom, that biblical idea, is really the marriage of joy and peace. It's what joy and peace together looks like. The thing I would say is that sometimes what we think is joy is really more of like excitement rooted in anxiety. It's excitement rooted in anxiety. We're desperate for people to like the thing we're doing and to get excited about it, and so we sort of stir things up. Joy doesn't need any of that. Joy comes from a person with whom we're in relationship. That's what being a fruit of the Spirit means. And so what I've found is that sometimes I'm looking to ministry in my anxiety, I'm looking to ministry to give me something I need to feel less anxious, whereas Joy doesn't need something from ministry, joy arises from communion with God, who is abundance personified. See again, anxiety paints a scarcity vision of my present and my future. Joy is not that at all. Joy is an abundance orientation. So to me, that sense of how the fruit of the Spirit come together is an important insight, that joy is never going to be good friends with anxiety. They're just they're just oil and water.

Jason Daye 
FrontStage Backstage is a ministry of PastorServe. Here at PastorServe, we love walking alongside of pastors and ministry leaders. If you'd like to learn details on how you might qualify for a complimentary coaching session with one of our trusted ministry coaches, please visit PastorServe.org/freesession now FrontStage Backstage is more than just another podcast. In fact, we create an entire toolkit that complements every single conversation, you can find this toolkit at PastorServe.org/network for this episode, and for every episode in the toolkit, you'll find a number of resources, including our ministry leaders' growth guide. In the growth guide, you'll find both questions and insights that are pulled from the conversation that you and the leaders at your local church or ministry can process together to consider how this content relates to your particular ministry context. Again, you can find the toolkit at PastorServe.org/network. Now we hope that you are finding this content valuable, and if so, we'd love for you to share, comment, like, follow, subscribe, that engagement is incredibly important, and also please take a moment to give us a review on your favorite podcast platform, your engagement and your reviews help other pastors and ministry leaders help find this valuable content. I'm Jason Daye. I'm encouraging you to love well. Live well and lead well. Thank you, and God bless you.