Mindy Caliguire: Becoming a Non-Anxious Presence in a Frantic Culture

Published by Outreach Magazine | December 9, 2024

Mindy Caliguire is the co-founder and president of Soul Care, an organization that cultivates soul health among leaders by providing pathways, practices and guides. She is the author, most recently, of Ignite Your Soul: When Exhaustion, Isolation and Burnout Light a Path to Flourishing (NavPress). She was also a featured speaker at the 2024 Amplify Conference for forward-focused church leaders and their teams. Preregister your team now for next year’s Amplify Conference.

In the following interview, we discuss burnout in the church, the need for church leaders to learn to rest well, and what she’s discovered about what it means to share your faith.

Are you seeing a different kind of burnout post-pandemic than you did pre-pandemic?

I don’t know, that’s a really good question. My view is that a lot of people were [either] burned out or were burning out, but we didn’t use that language as much. It was the water we were swimming in. A friend of mine, Stephan Tchividjian, said that before the pandemic everybody was swimming, and we were all naked—nobody was doing well—but when the pandemic happened, the tide went out. The level of awareness is higher than it was, for certain. It’s not that those [dynamics] didn’t exist, but we’re more aware and we’re more vocal about it, and we’re more willing to talk about it.

Alright, let’s be honest. How are we … actually? There’s a lot of burnout. Ministry leaders are exhausted. I mean, dirt-tired and isolated. There’s no isolation like ministry leadership. Leaders just need permission [to acknowledge] that taking care of their own soul is actually a first order priority, not something that happens once everything else is done—which is never the case. This was true of me back in the day. For me, in those days and with many leaders I’ve talked to since, it’s like you just stop believing that this stuff really matters to you anymore. Your job is just to make it available to everybody else, and you stop reading the idea that a yoke could be easy and a burden could be light, because it’s just too painful. What would it be like to bring their leadership from a place of overflow rather than a place of deficit?

One of the things I observe is that there is a growing number of leaders who are just refusing to keep doing the “crazy” anymore. And I think some of that is an emerging generation. I think it’s

those in their 20s and 30s, who are looking at my age group and above, who are saying, “I don’t want that life. And I don’t want to pay the price for my kids or my marriage that I’m now realizing was the price people were paying.

We have a lot of these massive public failures that have given a lot of people a bit of pause, like, Holy cow if that’s what was going on behind the scenes, how do I know that’s not true of the next 20 leaders that I look up to, and how do I know that isn’t [going to be] me someday. I think those are good points of humility, that growing refusal [to do the same things]. It’s huge.

Church leaders have always been optimistic, and everything around the next turn is great. What’s the next hill to climb, and all that kind of stuff. Now everybody’s been beat up pretty bad over the last few years, and I think any sort of naive optimism about how easy this is or any of that is … I don’t feel like I hear that as much right now. It is different and heavier than it was prior to the pandemic.

I have felt this sense—especially since social media and AI have become bigger and bigger topics of conversation—that our human tendency is to always aim toward efficiency: If I can do the same tasks faster in a shorter amount of time, that will be better. That will free up some magical space, we think. But then we end up filling that space that we created with more tasks. What do you think the key is to redeeming that time that we create rather than just using it as an excuse to pack our lives fuller?

I think it would be helpful for people to start to notice their tendency to cram more things in and possibly be avoiding what’s really going on inside. Now, that’s not to say that is what’s happening. That’s between them and God. I can speak for myself that there are times when I’m trying to cram—and I can tell. There’s almost like an avoiding of [being present] that comes. I think leaders need to learn to discern when is there this crank that just won’t stop, and what would it mean to just set that down for a minute.

AI can accelerate how fast we run into a brick wall, but it’s not the thing that’s causing the brick wall. It’s just the thing that makes us move faster and faster and faster toward really being inhuman. We lose our ability to be. And that is the biggest sadness.

I mean, it’s cool to find out what AI churns out based on everything that exists out in the interwebs. But what is your soul gonna hear from the living God, who is smarter than AI and what does the living God want to say to your circumstances? AI only looks backwards. AI can only draw from everything that’s happened before. We serve a God who is an expert in the future.

When we start moving away from time with the living God, what are we losing? We gain the whole world maybe, but we forfeit our souls. It’s keeping the soul connected to God in real time that is where we draw our life, that’s where we’re open to humility, that’s where we’re open to rest, we’re open to delight. These are a lot of the things that I’m bringing up in Ignite Your Soul.

What are some of the practices that breathe life back into our souls, not because of the practice, but because of how they connect us to the living God. Paying attention to where God is at work, participating with God and what God is doing, those are the practices that I am so excited for people to wrap their experience around, not just their mind, but to wrap their experience around, because that’s the gold. The thought of people connecting to God and then showing up to their families, neighbors, colleagues and organizations full, able to listen, at peace, at rest, able to work hard, but able to be used by God in whatever circumstance they’re in. That’s the lightning bolt. That’s the power. That’s where everything is. That’s what I long for.

That dovetails nicely with the opposite problem: The ways that we try to get rest are not always restorative. It’s almost like another aspect of burnout: If we’re not resting the right way then it’s not actually restoring us, and we may think we’re taking a break from the work that we’re doing, but there’s something inhuman about the ways that we rest.

I think that’s true. Greg McKeown, who wrote Essentialism, says, “The device in your hands is not a phone. It’s a three-trillion-dollar, military-grade, addiction-producing machine. And we are no match for it.” Recognize that you will not win the dopamine addiction battle with a device using platforms that are optimized to make you keep moving and addicted.

Now, can it have a place in your life that’s fun and culturally relevant and [provide] ways to keep in touch with people who are far away? Absolutely. But if you think that’s restorative—I mean, just look at us—it’s not restorative. It’s becoming a joke. It’s like, Yeah, I just wanna check what

my friend had to say, and then two hours later you’re still scrolling. And who took those two hours from you? That’s happened to me. I’m not saying I’m above it, but I think differently about it now because of that silly little quote. You’re not just reaching [for your phone] to respond to some notification. You are [pitting] your brain against a three-trillion-dollar addiction machine, and that puts it differently.

People have got to figure out how to actually experience rest. I work with a lot of leaders, and have for many years. One of the funny observations I’ve made is that high-powered leaders will leap tall buildings in a single bound, they will go days without eating, they will work on their budget, their presentations, their board decks, all this kind of stuff, but they won’t do a two-hour solitude assignment. I have found that rest is one of the hardest things for those leaders to do. It is like the hardest thing. They will do anything other than get quiet, put away their devices, and let go of outcomes.

I convinced a CEO that I work with to do a day retreat. He cleared his schedule at the end of his two-week vacation. I sent him a little solitude guide, [pointed] him in the direction of a book that I really love, and [later] I get this text: “Today has been life-giving in so many ways.”

My point is, for those who have the courage to carve out that kind of time, for those who have the vision that this will be not only worth my time, this will be generative to everything I care about, for those who have the willingness to be quiet in the presence of God—which can be scary, especially if you’ve been avoiding that—those streams of living water are a real thing. And I don’t even want to tether it to how much more effective that CEO is going be. That’s not the point. We become more human when we are alive to God and our bodies, our souls, learn to rest.

When we host—out here at Whisper Ranch—these concierge sabbaticals for very senior leaders, where it’s like, Give us the dates, we’ll figure out what you need, we’ll take care of it, the first two days before they’re here we put them up in a really fancy hotel. And it’s not just because like, Oh, bougie spa, whatever; it’s because I want people to let the noise floor drop and actually get into their bodies, because it is hard to do.

One of the first questions I’ll ask, like two or three days in, [is] how are the RPMs? And they’ll be able to tell me, Well, it’s just starting to slow, three days in. And that’s normal.

So how do we help people rest? It’s a pretty big theme in Scripture. In Isaiah 30:15, God says, “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.” We love that, that sounds great. But the last part of the verse says, “But you would have none of it.” And the broader context is—it’s almost pathetic in a way (I mean that in the pathos sense)—it’s like, I cannot believe how much God wears God’s heart on his sleeve, so to speak. God is begging his people to trust him, and in that whole chapter context he’s livid, because they keep going and making alliances to secure their well-being with Egypt, with Assyria. You’ve got this, you’ve got your armies, you’ve got your iron chariots or whatever else is in there, and in the middle of this tirade about God being offended as a jilted lover and as the God of the universe going, What are you doing? In verse 15, he’s saying in repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness—or unanxiousness is what that quietness idea is—in quietness and trust is your strength. But you would have none of it. And then he goes on to say, OK, you’ve made your bed; you get to lie in it. And then it goes on after that to say, But I am going to draw you back. My heart is toward you. God, even then, doesn’t leave them.

It is haunting to me, haunting to think that the supreme mover, the uncaused cause of the universe, is saying to little tiny humans on this little green rock, “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.” And I feel like we run after all kinds of things surging for our well-being as well. I do. It’s like, Oh, if I only had the right team or bank account or social media or this or that or the other thing—each of us has a list of things that in our heads are like, Oh, if we had that, everything would be fine. Again, they’re not, in and of themselves, a bad thing. But we leave off being a branch that’s connected to a vine. We leave off seeing God as our first order priority, as our first resource, as our first love. If God leads us to whatever that alliance is, or whatever that business strategy is, so be it. But that’s why we want to be alert to his whispers, so we can hear.

I think that’s God’s ache—if we could imagine him peering into our realm, watching the leaders of the body of Christ killing themselves to try to let a message of life be known—[he’s] saying, “I’ve done it all. I’ve made it all. Rest is available to you. My strength is sufficient for you.” So, I hope people will [rest]. It’s the hardest thing for leaders to do, and could be one of the most important.

I think a lot of church leaders think of evangelism as something that we do. Of course, it flows from our own faith, but we feel the sense of obligation that pushes us forward. What would it look like, from your perspective, [for] evangelism [to come] flowing from our identity in Christ, rather than something that we feel like we’re being pushed to do because of the Commission. 

I am particularly compelled by the alignment of the message of soul care to the call to evangelism. Often those get split apart [but] they’re actually quite tied together. Our world desperately needs people who are marked by inner peace, who can carry the shalom of God. It’s almost hard to remember somebody in your life who was a non-anxious presence. As we become the kinds of people whose deep rootedness in God in real time [is on display], what could happen? What could happen to the name of Jesus in our country and beyond if, increasingly, the people of Jesus are marked by the way of Jesus and the character of Jesus?  

I have never considered myself a very evangelistic person. I care about the cause. When my husband and I were at Willow Creek for a church planting internship back in the day, I would say that was when God really started to activate my heart for people who didn’t know God. So then we go to Boston to plant a church, which is all about reaching a culture, reaching a people, etc. And I’m building friendships with other women that are at the health club with me.

[After] my own soul care collapse, I’m in a rebuilding [phase] where learning to be authentic in my own skin was a huge thing. I had operated so much out of my head. I had operated so much out of what needs to be done, what’s the conceptual model? Drive. Drive. Drive. I needed to learn new ways of being in my own skin, being with other people, being with God. Those were huge areas of growth for me in that time.

So, then I started to notice things differently in the health club when I was building friendships with another mom of boys. I had three young sons, and so did she. She was from a Jewish family in the area. She asked me how I was doing one day. And the prior version of me would have been trying to position, Oh, a follower of Jesus is joy-filled, and I would have had a plastic version of me that I would have answered that question with, because I would have wanted her to have a high view of life with God. That was what I thought you were supposed to do. And

I found myself gut-checking, like, That’s just not honest. You’re having a hard day. You don’t know how to solve this thing with your four-year-old. So I decided to answer honestly, and I’m having this much more authentic conversation with somebody who has no interest, that I know of, in Jesus or church or anything. I was saying what was hard, and she kept probing a little bit more and it got to [the point of her asking], “What do you do when you don’t really have hope for that kind of a thing?” I knew she was asking me because she wondered how I was, but I knew she was also kind of asking for herself.

I found myself fighting for new words to describe how my faith was helpful to me in the areas of my fears and doubts and insecurities. There was no prefab tell your testimony thing going on here. This was me in real time translating. I wasn’t doing Christianese—which I was getting rid of for the most part anyway—I was just talking to my friend about where confidence in God was helping me, or where I was trying to have confidence. I came away from that conversation, which was one of the most life-giving, beautiful conversations. And I thought, Oh, this is what sharing your faith is supposed to be. I thought sharing your faith meant sharing the beliefs about faith. Instead, what I found myself doing that day was actually having to share my faith: What was I holding out hope for, and how did I explain that to somebody who had no religious context?

It makes me think of 1 Peter 3:15, about always being ready to give an explanation for the hope you have within you. And I find that a lot of Christians are ready to give an explanation for why they think they’re right. They’re ready to give an explanation for why they think the Bible is credible. Those can be very important conversations. But this is back to the evangelism [question], are Christians actually filled with hope right now? Could they explain to somebody the hope they have? And that’s what gets us to a non-anxious presence. That’s what gives us the ability to say, “I have hope in a living God, and it’s changing how I interact with my four-year-old, and it’s changing how I think about our mortgage that’s due next month, and it’s changing how I think about my value, my worth as a person.

I’m compelled with people living a way of life that keeps them connected to God, that naturally flows into conversations with people they love and know and care about. And I think the more grounded we are in God, the more able we are to actually give a flying rip about the family that lives next door or the person next to us on the train. We’re not so self-absorbed that we can’t see people, not as projects for our evangelism, but because we love them and we care. It opens up our capacity to care.