Anyone else got 'Passion Fatigue'?

Pete Greig, July 13th, 2010

Things are smoking right now on planet 24-7. This is one of our most exciting times ever. In the UK our Prayer Spaces in Schools initiative is expanding so fast we can hardly keep up. In Macedonia we’re running a kindergarten for the children of gypsies and hoping to soon launch a drug rehab scheme. In Ibiza the puke wagon is out every night rescuing people from the streets. I just went to Finland for the launch of the Finnish language edition of God on Mute and encountered a remarkable and growing hunger there for prayer and community. Before that I was in the States where we’re in the middle of the Campus America year and gearing up for the Northfields Summer Camp later this month. On-line we’ve just launched our new Prayer Room sign-up system which is getting great feedback. Globally the movement is growing faster than ever with years of non-stop intercession in Canada, Scotland and Australia. I could go on but you get the point... This is an amazing time of blessing, favour and opportunity

But maybe you skim-read that first paragraph. If so, I really don’t blame you... I often do the same.  We all zone out sometimes when others count their blessings a little too long. Glory stories get tedious after a while. You can have too much of a good thing. Compassion fatigue – that’s what they call it when our senses are blunted by too many emotional demands. We stop caring about things, not because they no longer matter but because they matter too much.

With so many great things happening all the time I sometimes discern in myself a condition you might call ‘Passion Fatigue’. Passion fatigue is a kind of spiritual complacency, an over-familiarity with God’s blessings, the gradual loss of excitement, gratitude and joy. When I’m suffering from passion fatigue I become weary, bored, unimpressed or even cynical around all expressions of enthusiasm. I glaze over during testimonies. I have learned the hard way that I must root it out ruthlessly and fast.

The apostle Paul urges us to rejoice and then, as if he suspects us of skim-reading he repeats: ‘I say it again, REJOICE!’  Elsewhere he tells us to bring our requests before God with grateful hearts. On this website we often try to encourage prayer, and in prayer rooms we cry out to God for things that really matter, but right now can I simply invite you to stop moment, take stock and give thanks? Maybe for the things listed in that first paragraph. Maybe for the blessings in your own life.

Thankfulness isn’t always easy.

In April I spoke at a large conference and afterwards a surprising number of people came forward requesting prayer for all sorts of heartbreaking situations. Normally I love talking and praying but on this occasion I was just dog-tired and secretly scanning the crowd for my wife; gasping for a quiet coffee.
But then a middle-aged couple came careering in my direction. She was weeping and seemed to be half-dragging her bedraggled husband towards me. I took a deep breath and mentally cancelled that double-shot latte. But having braced myself for another sad story I was unprepared for their actual request: ‘Will you help us,’ they asked, ‘to thank God for the life of our son?’ I blinked, and they continued: ‘You see he was nearly killed in a car crash a year ago. Doctors said he was going to die. But he didn’t. He lived. It was a kind of a miracle and we just realised while you were speaking that we’ve never actually given God the credit. We’ve never properly said thank you to God.’

This couple hadn’t come wanting anything from God – they just wanted to give something back to him. It was an act of gratitude pure and simple. And so we stood there the three of us, with tears in our eyes, thanking God for sparing the life of their son. All fatigue gone.