Visiting carries the other — but it wears down the one who carries. This sheet is for you, not for those you visit.
Entering again and again into others' pain, illness, and conflicts leaves its mark. Compassion fatigue is real: it is neither a sin nor a lack of faith, it is the price of a heart that stays open. Its signs: irritability, detachment, disturbed sleep, a sense of emptiness. To recognize this cost is already to guard against it.
Charles Spurgeon, the greatest preacher of his century, wrote a chapter that remains famous on his own bouts of depression: The Minister's Fainting Fits. His message: even the sturdiest ministers collapse, and it is no disgrace. If the man they called "the prince of preachers" said it of himself, you are allowed to say it of yourself. Do not carry alone what even he did not carry alone.
There is a bright flip side: visiting does not only cost you, it forms you. It keeps you close to what is real — far from the abstraction of the office and the pulpit. It teaches you people as they are, not as you imagine them. A pastor who visits preaches differently, because he knows whom he is speaking to. What wears you down, in part, is also what keeps you true.
You cannot visit everyone, and you are not required to. An elder, a deacon, a team can visit — visiting is a shared ministry, not your exclusive charge. Learn to say no to what is beyond you, to delegate what can be delegated, and to protect your own home and your rest. The pastor who neglects himself ends up making his own family pay for it, or the families he serves. To guard yourself is also to serve them.