02/04/2025
I met recently with a mentor who asked, “What can I do to bring the greatest value to your life and ministry?” I responded with, “Help me figure out how to reach my full potential for Christ.”
The reason I responded that way is because I tend to get comfortable, which gradually slides to complacency. As Wayne Smith, my wife’s home-church preacher, used to say, “A sliver leads to a slice, a slice to a slab, and a slab to a slob.”
We all battle against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the Law of Entropy. If left alone, things wind down, not up. Order moves toward chaos. Energy is required to push in the opposite direction for growth, learning, and development, and, quite honestly, sometimes that just takes a lot of … work. This applies to any arena of life—physical, spiritual, mental, emotional, relational—where we can just “let ourselves go” or “let ourselves grow.”
This may appear to be counterintuitive, but I believe the greater conundrum we fight in this battle is “boreout” more than burnout. And, yes, boreout is an actual term in psychology. Adam Grant tells us that “burnout is the emotional exhaustion that accumulates when you’re overloaded, but boreout is the emotional deadening you feel when you’re under-stimulated” (Hidden Potential, 90).
Many of us may feel like we struggle with burnout, but our deeper issue may be boreout. As in the hit Apple TV series, “Severance,” our job may be so monotonous that our emotional drain is from the obsessive slog rather than the fast-paced log of activities.
In part, this may be why our culture consumes media, entertainment, and politics like a pack of ravenous wolves. We’re trying to fill the void with stimulating inputs to make up for what we perceive to be meaningless outputs in our everyday world. If the real world is too drab and lifeless, we turn to a virtual world that deceitfully promises to bring enriched color to a rich-less existence.
The older I get, the more I discover how tempting it is to live life on cruise control. But maybe that’s because I find myself driving on the wrong roads. Jesus calls us to roads of twists and turns, but if I’m not careful, I fall victim to safety and security as more important than risk and reward.
Jesus came that we might have life and have it to the full (John 10:10). He calls us to leave our old way of life behind and step into a new life of surrender, leading to greater adventure. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people” (Matthew 4:19). The way of Jesus counters the Law of Entropy because it gives us the energy to wind up and not down, go further and not retreat, and drive the roads of twists and turn rather than just the paved streets of monotony.
I want to reach my full potential in Christ, but to do so will require grit, determination, energy, accountability, community, risk, and a “return to joy” (R.A.R.E. Leadership). My prayer for you is that you will step out of boreout and reach your full potential in Christ as well. I challenge you to do an “energy audit” and evaluate what drains you and what fills your tank. Develop a plan of how to reallocate your energy toward growth and challenge rather than an autopilot existence of mediocrity. Let’s reach our full potential for Christ.
