worldview and perspective on Exhaustion

Aren't you like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don't you often hope: "May this book, idea, cou...

Burnout is the disease of our age. Time magazine had an editorial way back in the 1980s about “the burnout of just about everybody.” I concluded that the metaphor of burnout was not quite right, parti...

A typical response to threat and burden is to want to flee it. It’s evacuation as the cure for trouble. If only I could get away is our mantra. Then I would be safe. Then I could enjoy my life. But wh...

As the world is weary of me so am I of it.

A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace.

Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to bre...

This is an age where our sense of spiritual possibility, transcendence, and the presence of God has been drained out. What’s left is a spiritual desert, and Christians face the temptation to accept th...

[If] your imagination of God is starved then when you come up against difficulties, you have no power, you can only endure in darkness.

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.

To most people nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...

The more I use stuff to fill up my hungers, the more distance I put between God and myself. And as I continue to fill up my infinite hungers with finite things (when I run through the Starbucks drive-...

Even desolation is a world to be explored.

You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst; you...

A person may fight ferociously to win success, to be better than everybody else, and then one day find it all seems empty and meaningless.

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrins...

We are a society that despises lack. We despise weakness and need and insufficiency. We turn the other way and pretend to be watching oncoming traffic when the red light halts us and the beggar reache...

The one misery of man is self-will, the one secret of blessedness is the conquest over our own wills. To yield them up to God is rest and peace. What disturbs us in this world is not “trouble,” but ou...

When human reason has exhausted every possibility, the children can go to their Father and receive all they need. ... For only when you have become utterly dependent upon prayer and faith, only when a...

Often we become apathetic in our lives until we face a severe storm. Whether loss of a job, health crisis, loss of a loved one, or financial struggle; God often brings storms into our lives to change ...

In The Phantom Tollbooth , there is a special kind of food called “subtraction stew.” Produced by a mathemagician, this stew makes you hungrier after you’ve eaten it. Our three main characters don’t ...

All addictions begin in shame. They don’t begin with troubling behavior—a binge on porn, a night of overdrinking–but with a sense of lack or limitation. An addict may be loved deeply, but sense of lac...

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

I remember taking my youngest son to one of the national art galleries in Washington, DC. As we made our approach, I was so excited about what we were going to see. He was decidedly unexcited. But I j...

For some people, a lack of purpose and meaning in life can provide fertile ground for the development of panic attacks and phobias.

The defining problem driving people out is …just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary American life simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is d...

Much as we long for infinities of power and duration, we have no evidence that these lie within our reach, much less within our responsibility. It is more likely that we will have either to live withi...

The ego is incredibly busy – in other words, it is always drawing attention to itself. It is incredibly busy trying to fill the emptiness. And it is incredibly busy doing two things in particular – co...

Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate.

Martin Luther King, responding to criticism from Southern White Pastors with respect to Civil Rights Activism: Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to s...