December 26, 2022

Are you well? Here are 4 four wellness touchpoints for 2022.

Monthly Theme: Why Wellness?

Reading time: two minutes.

So, what does flourishing in ministry look like? How do you define wellness?

It’s essential to consider what your spiritual, emotional, physical and vocational health look like when you’re at your best. Otherwise, as the saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re headed, any road will get you there.”

Let’s start the year with a few of the touchpoints for wellness. I think these four are the key touchpoints of a wellness lifestyle.

1. Self-awareness.

Do you know how to answer the question, “How are you doing?” How does God’s Word (the Law is a mirror) inform your self-awareness?

Self-awareness means continually asking yourself, “Why haven’t I slept well lately? How has that affected my mood? My family life? My work? My health?” What do you do for self-assessment?

It can mean asking how the habits you developed in your family of origin impact your life today. Or how an argument last night changed your day today. Be alert. We need more “alerts.”

Daily refreshment, renewal and healing in the Gospel of Christ

2. Self-awareness makes it much easier to find the gospel healing you need.

Wellness is remembering God’s unending baptismal covenant with you every day, taking time to pause and letting God love you, even though you didn’t earn it and don’t deserve it.

Wellness is welcoming God’s forgiving grace for the sins of yesterday and living in grace with others.

This is why Jesus came. For you. For healing. For today and for every day.

3. Healing leads to resilience

We’re in this for the long haul, and the haul of ministry is a long haul.

Professional church workers learn early on how to manage the weekly cycle, whether in the classroom or pulpit. The Sundays and the Mondays keep coming. Self-care is essential to keep meeting the demands of the next week, and the next, and the next…

Resilience is the capacity to recognize how rough last week, last month and last year have been, to find healing and refreshment, and to move forward in the power and the joy of Jesus.

A more pointed way of asking “Are you well?” is to ask, “Are you resilient?”

4.  Establish good boundaries (and learn to stay within them)

Our spiritual, relational, physical and vocational struggles are a warning from our loving Father to set up safeguards for our wellbeing.

As you look forward to the new year, what boundaries will you set for yourself that will help you flourish throughout the year and finish strong this December?

I hope you finished 2023 healthier, wiser, stronger and more energized for ministry than you began a year ago.

Grace Place Wellness is committed to offering all the encouragement and support we can through resources like our books and this blog (brought to you next month by my successor, Rev. Dr. Greg Walton), and through our online and live events to ensure that you flourish in this New Year.

God bless all your adventures of faith and service this year.

Thanks for reading.