OnFireFit

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Added 2025-09-01 11:00:03 +0000 UTC

Good morning!

This was a day I filmed a video that won’t post for some time but the message had been haunting me for some time. Haunting might be too spooky of a word but it was pressing on me, for sure.

Then, I was considering what I wanted to say to you today and I “happened” to read an email from a friend who has a daughter very similar in personality to me. Wanting to capture the fullness of each and every day. Maximize. Don’t waste time. Progress. More perfection. More productivity. Although I have gotten much better about this in my life, I can still relate.

The message of self-help culture can sometimes feed into this incessant need to be more, do more. Self-help content can be very useful and I enjoy learning things about the mind, how other people function in this world, etc. However, it is also mostly promoting both self-reliance and the “never enough” mentality. This often produces discontent when we fail ourselves or when we feel burned out with the never ending need for more growth, more “enough-ness!”

Isn’t it interesting that Jesus said, “Apart from Me, you can do nothing.” That doesn’t sound like a self-help quote! That sounds like intertwined reliance on the One who created you and actually knows what you need.

This should be a relief to all of us, but especially to those of us who can easily get caught up by “hustle culture.” When you feel you aren’t doing enough, you feel like you failed again or your identity has gotten hijacked by the deceiver, remember this: you were not meant to live life on your own self-improvement journey. Sure, the Holy Spirit is always at work to cause us to improve but disconnected from His guidance, it can become a trap.

Praise God for His gentle, loving and grace-filled ways of leading us! He is our true Good Shepherd.