Symptoms of an undernourished soul

Leaders need to be spiritually mature and healthy. The busy pace of our lives can lead us to a place where we are not taking in enough spiritual food to keep ourselves healthy. Pastors are at greatest risk, because we can fool ourselves into thinking that our time spent in Scripture preparing for a sermon counts as devotional reading. It does not! Years ago Harvey Cox identified some of the signs of an undernourished soul which now describe our whole society.

The symptoms of an undernourished soul appear in countless ways: violence, lethargy, alienation, alcoholism, deterioration of the family. The shrunken modern psyche is “just as much a victim of industrialization as were the bent bodies of those luckless children who were once confined to English factories from dawn to dusk.”--Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools,

Lest we fall into despair, P.L.Berman offers this word of hope:
“It does not matter how long your spirit lies dormant and unused. One day you hear a song, look at an object, or see a vision, and you feel its presence. It can’t be bought, traded, or annihilated, because its power comes from its story. No one can steal your spirit. You have to give it away. You can also take it back.”
--P.L.Berman, The Search for Meaning

The work of the church is to bring back to life the souls of people who don’t even know they have a spiritual problem. This is one reason why churches need leaders who can do more than just chair a meeting.