Trying to Mend While Coming Apart

Reflections from Poland, burnout, and the strange mercy of needing the thing you're building
- by Chris Scanlon (adapted from his Substack post of the same title published July 25, 2026)

On a very late evening, with the cool summer air telling us to debate long or short sleeves, I sat at a small table at a food hall. I drank a Pilsner that my brother in law so aptly described as “the first comfortable spring day” when you took a sip. I could feel the thin layer of grime that had accumulated on my skin from standing, walking, and helping prepare a meal for several hours, then sweating in an apartment hotel living room with 14 other people. The smell of sickly sweet hookah drifted over from an adjacent table filled with a double date.

To me, it was odd how late it was on a weeknight. I had spent the day listening to stories of deep despair, stories of hope, and joy. I heard accounts of incredible faithfulness and trust. I met people who could only be described as the dictionary definition of the hands and feet of God. People willing to give up much to serve those who have been displaced. People who themselves had taken on many burdens so others may find peace and rest. As we talked throughout the day of burn out, and vicarious trauma, there was hope. As we sat at that cool but sweaty table that night, my jet lag began to kick in. It led me to a jumbled vulnerability. I could not order my thoughts, and I realized I had never been jetlagged like this before. I felt physically awake, but mentally exhausted.

As refreshing and eye opening as that beer was, I realized in those moments how badly I needed a greater refreshment. I realized how poorly I had tended to myself.

Wroclaw town square featuring two my favorite people in the whole world.

Mending Together exists because we believe ordinary people can help carry the mental, emotional, and spiritual needs of those who have been displaced. It is not about perfection, but through presence, listening, shared meals, beauty, prayer, and communities that refuse to let people suffer unseen. Since the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland, and the Polish, have born a significant weight of meeting many unmet needs of refugees coming across the border. In June, I traveled with Mending Together to meet with partners, churches, and those who have been serving refugees.

And yet, as we were trying to build spaces of care, I could feel how little space for care had existed in me. The irony now is not lost on me, but in the moment I did not see it. Talking about trauma-informed care while recognizing that your own nervous system is fried, or asking people to slow down while your own life is packed to the gills. There is a strange irony in building something called Mending Together while quietly realizing that I might come apart at the seams if I add anything else to my life.

This season of life has been one of the most rewarding and beautiful times of my life, but it has also been one of the most challenging. Coming out of grad school, as has become habit in my life, I filled in the times that I no longer needed to keep empty for reading, and writing essays. Adding a third kiddo into the mix, Mending Together kicking into the next gear, and the abnormality of having Britta (my wife) home for most of the school year, has proven to complicate things more than I expected, all while trying to pay off student loans, and medical bills.

I don’t want this to feel too much like a diary entry, but there is a certain compounding nature to the feeling that you don’t have enough time in your day to work a 9-5, maintain a physical/spiritual/emotional presence for your children, run a nonprofit, be creative, write, and take care of yourself. Each hour that goes by feels like an hour not spent on all of the other things, and that weighs more and more as the minutes tick on. That’s not even to mention the guilt of feeling tired and exhausted while there are so many who are still suffering more. It is easy to question myself, “If I have 5% left in the tank, shouldn’t I use it all up because someone else is already at 0%?”

Burnout is a strange kind of poverty. Just like those who have less to give financially, donate more, 1 people running on empty can often see others needing help and still give more. The strangeness of it is that even on empty, we can continue to work, serve, or create. The danger is that the burnout just get's worse.

In 2022, I travelled with Marcus to Estonia, and one of the topics that I was going to teach on was anxiety, and especially its physical symptoms as well as grounding exercises. The night before I was supposed to teach, I could not sleep, my thoughts were racing. I worried that my teaching wasn’t going to be effective and it was not going to be helpful to the refugees and caregivers we were with. My heart was racing, and I started to have a pain in my chest, which then led to thoughts that I was having a cardiovascular issue of some sort, which led to worries about being in the middle of nowhere Estonia, which led to worse and worse thoughts.

I had never struggled with anxiety, but the irony is not lost on me. I was just five hours away from teaching on anxiety and could not recognize the symptoms myself because I had not experienced it. Sitting down outside the food hall in Warsaw was no different. Something I had never experienced before had come upon me, and my frazzled mind could not put 2+2 together. I quite literally felt my mind slow, and sentences were hard to formulate.

Sure, a little rest that night would go along way to cure the jetlag, but the burnout remained. The sentiment that I shared with caregivers we worked with, I needed to take to heart for myself. There are a million clichés to describe where I was at, but let’s just say that you cannot serve someone pierogi, if you have not been nourished with pierogi first. (Cathedral of St. John the Baptist on the left.)

When Marcus and I were brainstorming ideas for a name, and Mending Together was added to the list, it immediately took hold in my heart. There is a reciprocating, relational, two-way street nature to the name. As we have developed more formal programs, it has been easy to think that the program is something that we offer to others. In reality that flies in the face of what Mending Together is all about. It can be tempting to imagine the work of care as though there are two groups of people. Those who are hurting, and those who are helping.

The divide between those two groups is much thinner than we usually want to admit. While the help we all need might be different person to person, we all need help. The two groups of people really land within a Venn diagram that is a circle. If Mending Together is going to mean anything, then I cannot build it on the fiction that I am “fine”. The work cannot require displaced people or their caregivers to tell the truth about pain while asking myself, or my team, to hide their own exhaustion behind competence.

There is a version of helping that looks noble from the outside but is powered by fear. A fear of disappointing people. A fear of missed opportunities. A fear of being misunderstood. A fear that if I stop moving, the whole thing will collapse. The hardest part is that all of these fears can produce a lot of visible fruit, at least for a while. Emails get answered, plans get made, board meetings happen, tables are set, people are cared for. Underneath it all though, the soul begins to believe a dangerous lie that everything depends on me. This lie compounds and creates a weariness, the weariness I had not yet felt, or at least not yet noticed. I have seen many loved ones doing really great and important work fall into this trap. The work of loving and serving people in a broken world is hard, but weariness is not a fruit of the spirit.

After returning, and reflecting a little bit on our schedule, and the things we have been spending our time on, we have made adjustments. I cannot claim to have fixed everything. I am definitely still learning, and I hope this can be a cautionary tale. Just because the time on your calendar is empty, does not mean it needs to be filled with work. Sometimes it ought to be filled with rest. I also think that part of what our trip to Poland revealed is that Mending Together cannot grow out of my hidden exhaustion and still become the kind of thing we hope it will be.

If the work is going to remain relational, it may also need to grow more slowly. That does not mean the vision is smaller, but that the vision I have for my own life needs to be a bit more honest. I need to be more honest about capacity. I need learn to say no, and find the joy in missing out on things so as not to overburden my life. Limits are not the enemy of faithfulness to this vision, but simply the shape that faithfulness has to take.

Witch’s bridge above the Cathedral of St. Mary Magdalene. Wroclaw is filled with “Dwarves” or “Gnomes”. They have a fun history as a form of anti-communist protest by the Orange Alternative. Gnomes were originally painted on walls, but this is one of hundreds of statutes throughout the city pays modern homage to the resistance.