For much of my working life, chaos hasn’t been an event. It has been the weather: the overwhelm that never lifts, the conflict that never quite resolves, the betrayal that comes from people we trusted, and the triggers that drag old wounds into new meetings. When it gets heavier, I do what most leaders do. I learn a new skill, or I grit my teeth and dig deeper.
I’m not alone. In DDI’s 2025 survey of nearly 11,000 leaders worldwide, 71 per cent reported increased stress, and 40 per cent of those had considered leaving leadership to protect their wellbeing. In 2022, 42 per cent of American Protestant pastors told Barna they had seriously considered leaving full-time ministry; by late 2025 it was still almost one in four. The World Health Organisation defines burnout as “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”. Most of what we reach for simply tries to manage it better.
Here is my proposal. Skill and resilience both matter, but neither can save us, and the chaos we’re living through asks for something closer to digestion: a way of metabolising what we carry, rather than storing it up or passing it on.
Technique: The promise of one more framework
I know the siren voice that lures leaders. Somewhere, it says, one more framework, one more course, one more practice waits to unlock everything. If I can acquire the right skill, I can finally become the leader I need to be.
Modernity has trained us to listen, and to treat almost everything, even our own souls, as a technical problem: diagnose it, find the right intervention, produce the outcome. Skills do matter. But leadership isn’t finally a technical problem, because its primary instrument is a person. When I look to technique to make me adequate, I’m asking it to do what only grace can do. No method can bear the weight of salvation.
Resilience: No pot big enough
Resilience brings us a promise that is seemingly and genuinely humbler, but ultimately still insufficient. If I can’t fix the chaos, it says, perhaps I can outlast it. Therapy, coaching, rest and plain grit all help. But no resilience pot, however carefully we tend it, is big enough to hold everything life pours into it.
So the real question is what happens to the pressure and pain we carry. Stored up, it builds inside us like limescale in a kettle; the neuroscientist Bruce McEwen called this allostatic load, the wear and tear of stress responses that never quite switch off. Passed on, it spills onto colleagues and families who never asked to carry it.
A bargain: Why both promises hold us
Why do both promises, of technique and resilience, grip us so tightly? I suspect that for many leaders, and certainly for me, an older bargain sits underneath them, struck before we had words for it: Skill promises we can meet everyone’s needs, and resilience promises we can keep giving forever. Both serve the bargains we make. Neither can keep it.
Jeremiah heard God name this exhausting labour long ago:
They have forsaken me, the source of living waters; they have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water. (Jeremiah 2:13)
That’s what all our digging deeper looks like.
Metabolising: Participation in Christ’s body
Every healthy body metabolises. It takes in what it is given, breaks it down, keeps what gives life and clears away what would poison it. Our bodies do this with food without being asked. They cannot do it with chaos. The pain, the conflict and the toxins that build up over years of overwhelm are more than any one person can break down, so we store them or we pass them on. What we need is a body that can take them in without being poisoned by them.
Christians claim there is such a body. The Christian life is participation: being joined, by the Holy Spirit, to the life and the body of Christ. In becoming human, Christ took on our flesh and, with it, our capacity to be hurt. He knew overwhelm in Gethsemane, conflict with the powerful and betrayal by a friend. “Yet it was our pain that he bore, our sufferings he endured,” says Isaiah (Isaiah 53:4). Gregory of Nazianzus, in the fourth century, put it in one line: “that which He has not assumed He has not healed.” What Christ takes into his body, he heals.
On the cross he took in the worst that chaos produces: violence, injustice, abandonment and death itself. He did not store it up, and he did not pass it on. He carried it down into death, and death could not keep him; God raised him up “because it was impossible for him to be held by it” (Acts 2:24). His risen body still bears its wounds, but they no longer poison anyone. “By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). That is metabolism at its deepest: suffering taken in, broken down and turned into life.
Participation means our pain can go where his went. Paul says we were “buried with him” so that “we too might live in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Augustine heard God describe himself as “the food of strong men”, and add: “nor shall you convert me, like the food of your flesh, into you, but you shall be converted into me.” Ordinary food is metabolised into us. In Christ the direction is reversed. We are taken up into him, and what was poisoning us is left behind in his death.
My own prayer once showed me what this looks like. A few years ago, after spiritual direction, I was praying the Anima Christi, a medieval prayer that Ignatius commends in his Spiritual Exercises. In my imagination I was lying in the tomb beside the body of Jesus, and I let something in me die with him. Then, my hand in his like a small boy with an older brother, I went down with him into the place of the dead. On my own, that darkness would have swallowed me. With him, it couldn’t get a grip. Death could not hold him, and so it could not hold me.
Somewhere in that descent I realised what I had carried down with me: the overwhelm of years of leadership, which I had been holding on my own. I did not have to carry it back up. Jesus took it into his death and left it there, and I came back without it.
The consequences have been ordinary. I already knew most of what I needed to do; what changed was the effort it took. I could be moved by someone’s distress without being driven by it, and when I felt the old pull to dig deeper, I could turn to Christ in the middle of the demand.
Is this just spiritual bypassing, using prayer to dodge grief, therapy and change? It’s a fair question. But Christ’s body is not only his own. Paul calls the Church his body too (1 Corinthians 12:27), and much of the metabolising happens there: in grief shared with friends, in therapy, in confession, in people who help carry what we cannot (Galatians 6:2). Prayer doesn’t replace any of that, and sometimes the faithful response to chaos is to resist harm and change the conditions that produce it.
The invitation
Chaos is normal. For most of us it will remain the weather of leadership: the overwhelm, the conflict, the betrayal and the triggers. We cannot out-technique it, however many frameworks we master, and we cannot simply absorb it and store it away, however much grit we summon, because whatever we store eventually poisons us or spills onto the people around us. We were never meant to carry it on our own, and the old bargain that says we must can never keep its promise.
But there is another way to live inside the chaos. Christ’s body can take in what would poison ours, and we are invited into that body: not to admire it from a distance, or to imitate it by effort, but to share its life. Everything we carry can go where he went, into his death, where it is broken down, and out the other side as life. That is what it means to metabolise rather than store up or pass on.
The way in is humbler than any technique. It begins when we tell him the truth about what we are carrying and let him take it, in prayer, in confession, and through the friends he gives us to help carry it. It continues every time the old pull to dig deeper comes and we turn to him in the middle of the demand instead.
Jesus put the invitation plainly: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). So what are you carrying that was never yours to carry? Bring it to him. Let him take it down into his death. And come back without it.