A few years ago, I met a girl while volunteering at a homeless shelter. She was around my age, was friends with some people I knew from my old church, and she was always very soft spoken. Never raised her voice, always chose her words carefully, and never made a big fuss out of anything. When it came time to work, she put her gloves on and got things done. In many ways, she was quite commendable. I gained more respect for her when I found out that she was taking her faith seriously, and was actively trying to learn more every day. It was good to see someone like her out in the open, being humble about her grades and her university aspirations, while also being rooted in her love of Christ. Humbleness is quickly becoming a lost language in this world, and so is Christianity.

Eventually, I found myself working at the same summer camp as her. If you read #4 from a few months ago, know that I’m referring to the same camp I talked about in that post. While I was down there, things were relatively normal, and many good memories were made by all of us. When it came time for us staff members to share our testimonies, most of us wrote them down on paper, while others went off the cuff. It seemed like everyone had some crazy story to share, ranging from car accidents to running away from home. I had my own story as well, and sometimes I wish I could go back then and give my younger self a gut punch because of how sensationalized I made it. A terrible practice, and a day which makes me cringe every time I think about it.

The same can be said about when this girl got up and spoke, albeit for much different reasons. Turns out, she had attempted suicide. Nearly died from it, too. She had always seemed to be in total control of her emotions, but that changed when she spoke up. She spoke of this darkness, this “burnout” that she had experienced from all the expectations she and her family had put on herself, and she thanked God for bringing her out of that and back into the light. Like the other stories, a good ending, but unlike them, there was something that made my brain start to hum.

This “burnout” she spoke of was somewhat familiar to me, but not in the way she had described it. For her, it was brought about by her generally low self-esteem, as well as the extreme stress she put herself through in order to succeed. Pushing herself the way she did eventually led her becoming apathetic to daily life, and the nasty voices she often dealt with began to creep back into her head, telling her things that I won’t repeat here. After that came her suicide attempt, and while she had rebounded quite well from that, she never was the same person after she told us all of that. As of right now, I haven’t seen her in a few years and from my knowledge, she has completely stepped away from the church. It is unfortunate, but there’s not much I can do there. Hope she’s doing well.

Moving on from her, I later spent time reading accounts of people getting burnout, what it felt like, and how they overcame it in the end. While every story was different, there were a few patterns I picked up on, one of them being this sort of fatigue set in for many people. In these stories I read, the authors explained how they got really into a new hobby and they focused on it almost exclusively in their spare time, only for them to eventually crash and not come back to it for months, and sometimes even years. While it doesn’t necessarily fall under the category of depression or anything I mentioned above, I did eventually find myself relating to those feelings pretty strongly.

In 2021, I discovered what ended up being one of my favorite series of video games in Yakuza (now called Like A Dragon). Beginning with Yakuza 0, which is canonically the earliest game in the series, I ended up playing through all of the mainline games, including two spinoffs in Judgment and Lost Judgment, all in one year. To put it in perspective, that’s 10 games, and a total of 577 hours split across every game. That comes out to about 24 days in total, and this isn’t even factoring in the hours I put in after I finished the main stories in each of them. That stretch is by far the most I’ve ever invested in a single series, and I don’t think there will be anything that ever comes close to beating that.

Needless to say, once I finished the final game I had to play at the time, this feeling of emptiness gradually began to settle in. Not because it ended on a sour note, it was instead due to this now-present hole in my mind that needed to be filled. That was usually cured with playing new games or replaying old ones, but every time I tried to pick up a controller or put on my headset, my motivation died before I even had the chance to decide what I wanted to do. I burnt myself out by grinding through that series, and it wasn’t until later in 2022 when I was able to really get back to playing anything at a similar pace to how I did before Yakuza.

Now that I’m writing all of this, I’m reminded of the last post I wrote. In that one, I talked about how the body is the temple of the Lord, and how we need to treat it better. In a sense, this could serve as an unofficial sequel, as I feel that message could be sort of applied here. Having hobbies is great, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with playing video games or reading books semi-regularly. The same goes for work: it’s important, it needs to be done, and tackling it in your own way can be very good. However, we are not meant to make any of those things the #1 priority in our lives. Rooting ourselves in the world instead of the Word leads to ruin.

While 2021 was a very important year for both my growth as an individual and as a follower of God, I’ll admit that I could have used so many of the hours I spent playing through Yakuza to dive even deeper in the Word and become even closer with God. I spent so many evenings staring at a computer screen and burning my retinas listening to screaming Japanese men instead of laying back with my Bible and burning away my shame, and while I don’t regret playing through the series, I do regret how I prioritized it over time with the Lord.

As for time with the Lord, I would make some cheesy joke about how you can’t really get spiritual burnout, but I don’t really think that’s funny when it comes down to it. If anything, it’s beautiful. There’s a reason connecting with God and praying feels so special, and that’s because it is. Deep inside, we long to be closer to God all the time, and sometimes we even cry out his praises because of how overcome we can be. There is no end to God’s love for us, and so it should be the same for our love for God. There can be no burnout there, only constant nourishment that we can truly not find anywhere else.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have hobbies, however. I still play games here and there, I still read books or manga when I’m in the mood, and I’m still keeping this project going. The difference is that I’m pacing myself in a healthy way, while also allowing way more time for God to be involved in my life than before. I’m not doing any of them compulsively like I used to, and that’s how it was intended to be. I advise you do the same.

See you next time.