One of the sessions, she told the church council later, was about volunteer burnout. About how churches run their most faithful people into the ground. The same handful of people doing the same unpaid work for decades, until they quietly die or quit, and the church has built nothing that outlasts them.
She looked at five women in their sixties and seventies, climbing up and down the basement stairs with roasting pans at six in the morning.
And she saw burnout.
She didn’t see what my friend Sharon Lindqvist would have seen in about thirty seconds. Sharon used to dispatch for the county sheriff before she retired. She told me later, over coffee, exactly what she’d have seen.
Five women who had never once complained. Never once asked to be let off. And who would have told you right to your face that carrying a roaster down those stairs wasn’t a cross they were bearing.
