If you don’t have a burden in life, you probably won’t achieve much

By David McElroy · November 19, 2018

Atlanta pastor Andy Stanley grew up in a home with one of the most popular Southern Baptist pastors in the country, so he saw many major pastors and religious leaders come through his home when he was a kid.

Stanley said there were certain ones which would cause his father to later say with a shake of his head — in the privacy of the family — “that man doesn’t have a burden.”

What did Charles Stanley mean by that? It was his judgment that a particular pastor might be talented and popular and respected, but the man wasn’t driven inside by a burden for anything he was trying to change or anyone he was trying to help.

That phrase resonated with me when I heard it this week in an interview with Andy Stanley. Maybe it makes so much sense to me because I’ve heard it used in church all my life. People who talked about having a burning need to minister to certain people would talk about having a burden for them: “I have a burden for young people who are growing up in broken homes,” or, “I have a burden for young mothers who have been abused and have nowhere to go.”

In my experience, those who had a burden on their hearts for certain people were the ones who were effective and made a difference. Those who didn’t have such a burden were just going through the motions — and their words eventually felt phony.

When I served as a youth minister on a church staff while I was in college, I spent many Sunday afternoons with our pastor’s family, especially when we had visiting preachers or dignitaries. It was my first long-term experience of listening to pastors speak in public and then spending time with them in private.

I soon learned that there were some men — they were all men back then — who were just as privately burdened about their work as their public appearances made them appear to be. These were the men who believed passionately in what they were trying to do and worked tirelessly because they were genuinely burdened by a need to change things.

There were other men — a majority of the ones I met — who didn’t seem like the same people in private. It wasn’t that they seemed evil or untrustworthy. They were simply more concerned — behind closed doors — about how successful they were and whether they might move up in denominational politics. Those men seemed to care only about themselves. Their public appearances seemed more like a performance. They seemingly had no burden for any people or any cause.

In the interview I heard this week, Andy Stanley was talking about this idea of having a burden in the context of organizational leadership. He meant that a leader has to know why he’s doing something. If a leader doesn’t feel a burden — or a passion — about something, he’s not going to be able to fake it for too long. He’s going to burn out or at least reach the point that he’s just going through the motions of living a fairly meaningless life.

I think this idea applies to all of us. Everybody who has a burden for something has a reason to get up in the morning — and it’s not just so he can be more powerful or make more money. A really successful person ultimately has to have a burden for something he needs to achieve in the world.

The burdens I have mostly revolve around communicating ideas to individuals. Why do I care about those things? It’s because I’m extremely sensitive to a world that is full of miserable and hurting people — and I have a strong burden to share some ideas about how we can collectively learn to quit hurting each other and I have a burden for figuring out ways in which we can live together in peace without destroying one another.

Those things don’t start with politics or public spectacle. They start with choices that we individually make. They deal with how we choose to love each other as individuals. They deal with how we choose to raise our children. They deal with how we choose to separate ourselves from a culture which is toxic and which leads us to individual and collective misery.

If you have no burden, it’s hard for me to see how you’re going to achieve anything worth doing. Even if you’re smart and talented and hard-working, you don’t have enough of a “why” to drive you to make any difference.

Just having a burden doesn’t mean you’ll automatically achieve anything. It doesn’t mean you’ll definitely be successful in helping the people for whom you have a burden. You might fail. But without the passion that comes from a burdened heart, it’s unlikely you’ll ever even try to do anything worth doing.

At different points in my life, I’ve struggled to define exactly what my burden for the world is. I’ve interpreted it in various ways — and I’ve made different plans based on my changing understanding — but I’ve always known the burden was there. I feel it more strongly than ever today.

Do you know what your burden is? What is your purpose? Do you have anything you’re really trying to change? Or is you life locked on the autopilot of daily living that will leave you an old and bitter person who wakes up one day and realizes you never really lived?

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts