The Burden Is Light: Liberating Your Life from the Tyranny of Performance and Success

Unwilling to wait for the resources God will provide, we resort to credit, stretching beyond our means in an attempt to create immediate outcomes. Our temptation to control often results in slavery to the unintended consequences of our fear-driven decisions.

I feel that you took the gifts I had as a teenager and leveraged them to build something for yourself, and I came out pretty lost. I felt like a commodity. I just wanted you to know that because you are still in ministry, and I don’t want other people to have the same experience I had.”

It is evil to use people for our own glory. It is evil to do good things for bad reasons. It is evil to have influence without intimacy. It is evil to do things in Jesus’s name without Jesus’s compassion. Impact without intimacy is evil.

The greatness of a man’s power is the measure of his surrender. William Booth

My secret is that I want to be relevant and popular. I want my desires fulfilled and pain minimized. I want a manageable relationship with an institution rather than messy relationships with real people.

Many have found the trapeze to be a rich metaphor for the concept of surrender. One reason this metaphor resonates has to do with one of several meanings of the word surrender: “to give over, to return that which truly belongs to another.”

I want to wear my faith on my sleeve and not look at the darkness in my heart. And above all, I want a controllable god. I want a divine commodity to do my will on earth as well as in heaven.

There is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life.

The goal of ministry is to set people free, not simply to enjoy wielding spiritual authority.