When I was a boy I used to pretend I owned a helicopter. I would fly to the poorest places in the world and feed deprived people from its doors. My little sister and her stuffed animals were charged with pretending to be the needy, broken people who were starving. I, of course, was always the superhero who landed in the middle of the jungle just in time to rescue them!
As I grew older, my desire to help people grew stronger and more mature. I often found myself picking up hitchhikers and taking them home to feed them. I married young, and together my wife and I continued to reach out to the broken from our tiny house. Consequently, hurting people lived with us for seventeen of our first twenty years of marriage. In fact, I don’t remember any of our children ever having his or her own bedroom.
My love for the broken has caused me to struggle over the years with pastors who seem untouchable, unreachable, or unavailable. So when I joined the Bethel Church team, I refused to have an unlisted phone number.
One night after work, Kathy and I went out for dinner. We arrived back home at 8:00 p.m., and I noticed our answering machine was beeping (anybody remember the days before cell phones?). I pushed the play button on the machine and was shocked by what I heard. There were thirty-eight messages from thirty different people on the tape, and they were all begging for help. Counseling was one of my primary responsibilities at the church, and I averaged six to eight sessions a day, four days a week; but I never expected this!
For several minutes the two of us endured the cries of desperation until finally Kathy couldn’t take it any longer. With tears in her eyes she declared, “You have to help these people!”
Exhausted from a tough week of counseling, I shouted back, “You help them! I am maxed out! You have no idea how drained I am. I am done helping people. Needy people are everywhere. They are a bottomless pit, and they are killing me!”
The argument continued through the night as the two of us tried to come to terms with our situation. In fairness to Kathy, she had never seen me “peopled out.” There was always enough love to go around in our home, and we helped almost everyone who asked for it. So Kathy was understandably upset when I refused to spend the night calling back thirty frantic people.
Over the next several months the challenge escalated. I tried to increase my counseling load to solve the problem, but every time I counseled one person, several more people would be sent to me for help. Sunday was the worst day of the week! After every service fifty people would gather at my seat for “prayer.” I often dragged my butt to bed at one o’clock in the morning.
I was drowning in the sea of love. I wanted to run away and never come back. I finally got an unlisted phone number, but people just found other ways to get to me. I would lie in bed at night thinking of all the hurting people I had avoided during the day. Accusations flooded my mind. You are a Pharisee. Remember the good Samaritan? He helped the person he encountered. But the Pharisee crossed the street to avoid the broken man’s pain. You are doing the same thing your fathers the Pharisees did. If you cared about people, you would lay down your life for them. You just love the attention you get when you preach; you don’t really love people. You are a whitewashed tomb full of dead men’s bones . . . the bones of those you refused to help this week!
To make matters worse, people I didn’t have time to support wrote me terrible letters that helped to validate these indictments against my soul.
One night in desperation I prayed, “What do You want me to do with all of these hurting people?”
The Lord responded, “There is always enough time to help all the people I send to you. Furthermore, you only have answers for the people I send to you. So your job is to please Me and not to worry about what others think of you. You will always have the poor with you!”
A few months later, Jesus reprimanded me again. “You seem to have forgotten that I am the Savior of the world. You, on the other hand, are a laborer in the field. You just concern yourself with the task I have assigned you in the field I placed you in. In the meantime, I will remain the Redeemer of the planet.”
It’s been nearly twenty years since I listened to those desperate cries on my antiquated answering machine. To this day, I have not once laid my head on my pillow having personally met more than about 20 percent of the needs I am confronted with on any given day. There are seven billion people on this ailing planet, so I am convinced that the only people who meet the needs of everyone who asks for help live in insolation, or they lead self-absorbed lives.
Over these past few years I learned first how to survive and then, sometime later, how to thrive in the midst of this intense chaos. I finally came to grips with the fact that there’s more to do in a day than any one of us can accomplish. Working harder may be necessary at times, but it won’t ever solve the ultimate problem. The truth is if you become a provider of hope, you won’t have to worry about the competition, because there will always be more customers than carriers.
Life is a delicate balance, a dance with time and priorities, a Holy Spirit journey of discovering what it means to be about our Father’s business. In this crazy and chaotic world of intense need, we can only thrive when guided by Someone more brilliant than us.
Build Boundaries
Let me ask you a question: Is it common for you to rush from fire to fire feeling obligated to meet the needs of everyone who calls upon you? If you answered yes, then consider this: When you live that way, you leave the important people and divine purposes (that may not be on fire) neglected, deserted, and ignored. But the dysfunctional cycle doesn’t stop there, because eventually the neglected essential people and your abandoned vital purposes catch on fire. Sometimes they are completely destroyed before you can free yourself from the obligations of others to douse the flames of distraction on your own divine connections and sovereign destiny.
Let me ask you a few more questions. Who initiates most of your meetings? Do you, or does someone else? Do you spend most of your days returning phone calls, or are you the one originating them? If you don’t have a plan for your life, other people will provide one for you. The fact is, most of the needy people and many of the powerful people around you have strong opinions about what they think you should be doing.
You must set boundaries. When you don’t set limits with people, they dictate your destiny, and your life becomes a menagerie of meeting other people’s expectations while missing the call of God on your own life. God has given you a race to run, a fight to finish, and a path to follow. Don’t let others distract you from it.
Great leaders must master the art of being deeply compassionate without letting the desires of others dictate their destinies or dominate their daily priorities. Let me be clear: I’m not talking about being self-centered or self-absorbed. Neither am I saying that the needs of others shouldn’t influence your activities. They should!
In fact, in the middle of writing this chapter today, one of my team member’s wives passed away. She was just forty-three years old with three young, beautiful children and the most amazing husband I have ever met. Yesterday I sat and wept with her. Her ten-year-old son sat by my side because he was convinced that if the two of us prayed for his mama (just one more time) she would be healed. Instead, twelve hours later she went home to be with the Lord.
I don’t care how busy you are; you should never be too busy to touch the desperate needs of the people in your inner circle. This wasn’t a disruption in my schedule; touching those who serve me and are in my family is part of my journey in the Spirit.
I hope you understand by now that I am not untouchable, rigid, or heartless; but I have decided that I will not fear people, nor will I be enslaved to them. You and I are called to serve God by serving people. But we are not called to serve people instead of serving God (Acts 5:29).
YOU AND I ARE CALLED TO SERVE GOD BY SERVING PEOPLE. BUT WE ARE NOT CALLED TO SERVE PEOPLE INSTEAD OF SERVING GOD.
Being Misunderstood
One of the difficulties of pursuing the call of Jesus on your life is confronting the fear of man. If you fear people, you are not leading them; they are leading you. You must come to grips with the fact that if you are following Jesus and you refuse to fear people, you will be misunderstood. In the midst of that, remember that you are called to serve somebody, not called to touch everybody. The challenge is that many of the people you are not called to serve will disagree with you. What you do with the accusations of those people determines how much God can entrust to you.
One way that you can deal with being misunderstood is to harden your heart. I call it the “I don’t care what you think” syndrome. But becoming hard-hearted and uncompassionate to protect your soul is a bad plan. You will wind up being just a shell of your destiny, and you will sabotage your ultimate purpose in life. It is therefore incumbent upon you to learn how to deal with false accusations, ridiculous expectations, desperate manipulation, and people’s distorted perspectives of you.
I know what I am talking about. I have 220,000 followers on Facebook as of this writing, and it’s growing at a rate of almost two thousand people a week. Unlike most leaders, I actually enjoy managing my own page. I get about twenty to fifty private messages a day on Facebook alone. Every day several people make huge requests of me, such as, “Can I make a counseling appointment with you?” “Here are five questions I have for you.” “Can you call my mother and wish her a happy birthday?” “Can you give me a prophetic word?” “Here is my complex marriage problem. Can you tell me what I should do?”
Of course there is no way I can do any of these things and still have time to breathe, so I must graciously decline their requests. Sometimes their reactions can be shocking! Recently a young lady said I was treating her like a “[expletive] dog” and that I shouldn’t even call myself a Christian. Why, you ask? Because I refused to set up a counseling appointment with her. (She is a Facebook fan . . . we have never met.) I am not sure what people think leaders do all day, but evidently it’s not much!
I work hard to remind myself that desperate times call for desperate measures, and when any of us are hurting we will do whatever it takes to get help. That is why I proactively recall the times I was so dang desperate that I violated every boundary to get help.
I recall one time when my eight-year-old daughter, Jaime, had a grand mal seizure at school. For some reason the school called me instead of an ambulance. Jaime had never had a seizure before, and I had never witnessed a seizure. I thought Jaime was dying! So I grabbed her, threw her in the passenger seat of our car, and raced to our doctor’s office, ignoring every stop sign and speed limit. When I got there, I started yelling, “My daughter’s dying! My daughter’s dying! Where is Doctor Nielson?”
The nurses tried to calm me down, but I pushed them away as I ran from room to room shouting the doctor’s name. When I barged into the last patient room, still trying to scream the doctor’s name while completely out of breath, there was Doctor Nielson staring at me with a shocked expression on his face. He was performing a minor surgery on a patient when I forced my way into the room with three nurses in tow. Ignoring his plea to calm down, I grabbed him by the arm and forced him to my car, yelling, “She is dying, she is dying!” When we got to the car, Jaime was still in a full-blown seizure.
He looked up at me and said, “She isn’t dying! She is having a seizure. She is going to be okay.” Thankfully, after a year of many more seizures, several brain scans, and hospital stays, God healed Jaime completely. It’s been thirty years since that desperate day, and she has not had one seizure since she was healed.
Why did I tell you this story? Because we must remember how it feels to be desperate, so we can extend mercy to the people who violate our healthy boundaries in an effort to rescue themselves or their loved ones from trouble. Frankly, I often recall this painful story whenever someone does something crazy to get my attention.
When Jesus walked the earth people did radical things to get His attention. Desperate people ripped the roof off a house and lowered their friend down right in front of Jesus so He would heal him (Luke 5:18–20). Others screamed bloody murder to get His attention as He passed by (Mark 10:46–52). A sinful woman crashed a high-level dinner party to wash His feet with her tears and hair and expensive perfume (Luke 7:36–39). They were all frantic people who were starving for the Master’s touch.
The world is filled with desperate, hurting, and dying people who will do anything to get help. You are called to help some of them, but if you don’t learn how to say no and set healthy boundaries, soon you won’t be able to help any of them. I could tell you a thousand stories of people who were offended by me, not because I did something wrong, but because I didn’t have time to do anything for them. When these people reacted unhealthily, I could have chosen to build a wall around my heart to protect myself; instead, I have chosen to work hard at learning not to take their words to heart. I just try to focus on the mission God has called me to accomplish for Him and live in His peace.
I Am the Savior of the World . . . NOT!
In 2008 I found myself almost unable to get off my couch for six months. For the first time in my life I was fighting depression that was so deep it felt as if someone had dropped me in a dark hole in the earth and left me for dead. I seriously didn’t want to live anymore. To make matters worse, I was having fifty panic attacks a day, and I didn’t sleep for nearly six months.
It all started when one of my daughters had an emotional breakdown and couldn’t leave her bedroom. With two small children who were crushed by her behavior, a husband who called me several times a day for help, and a church they pastored that was trying to understand their dilemma, it was unbelievably stressful.
That same month, Bill suddenly became deathly ill with Hepatitis C and was quarantined to his house. Danny Silk and I picked up most of Bill’s conferences, along with our own. Consequently, we were traversing the earth to cover all of the bases.
Just as things started to improve slightly, my son walked into my office one day and told me that his marriage was in trouble. Eight months later, his wife ran away with a guy who got her pregnant, leaving three children and a broken husband to grieve!
I decided that it was my responsibility to fix all of this, so I became the savior of the world. But six months into my savior role I crashed and burned. I became another family casualty, an immobile tank burning on the side of the road overlooking a city on fire. It would take nearly three years for my family to recover. The complete story is in my book Spirit Wars, but it should suffice to say that I learned a few things about boundaries and not diverging from Jesus’ calling during battle.
Let me close this chapter by stating the obvious: everyone has limits! I don’t care who you are; if you don’t set boundaries with people, they will work you to death and then say nice things about you at your funeral. I like the saying, “A man of too many friends comes to ruin” (Proverbs 18:24).
There are people all around you who love you; but the truth is, you are the only one on this earth who really knows you . . . your energy, your stress level, your fears, and your passions. No one else can set boundaries for you. You have to muster the courage to say no, to risk being misunderstood, to refuse to live under the expectations of others, to be satisfied at times with pleasing only God.
YOU HAVE TO MUSTER THE COURAGE TO SAY NO, TO RISK BEING MISUNDERSTOOD, TO REFUSE TO LIVE UNDER THE EXPECTATIONS OF OTHERS, TO BE SATISFIED AT TIMES WITH PLEASING ONLY GOD.
This is the cross you must bear for the sake of your soul, for the sake of your family, and for the sake of the Kingdom. Boldly do what you have never done before, so you can be the person you have always wanted to be.