SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to another episode of Jubilee Life Coach's blog. In today's episode, Am I Exploiting Myself? I talk about the dangerous trap of treating your life like a project to be managed instead of a gift to be lived. And why succeeding on the outside often leaves us feeling hollow on the inside. Let's take a listen. Am I exploiting myself? Now those are the words of Kim Mi Yang, speaker, author, and entrepreneur. In a recent interview, a viewer had written in, on the outside I look fine, but inside I am falling apart. Work is okay, but the moment I come home, it's like the power goes off. I'm hollow. Every day I just get through it on duty. Now does any of that sound familiar? There is a version of ourselves built for the world, competent, capable, productive. Call it the functional self. We invest in it heavily. Then there is the self that comes home at night, the one we leave in the corner to fend for itself. Ed Weld in When People Are Big and God is Small, published in 1997, traces this to a deeper root. When we hand the weight of our worth to other people's approval, those people quietly grow larger than God in our inner world, and we stop seeing ourselves from the inside and begin perpetually evaluating ourselves through external eyes. The functional self is the structure that fear builds. Tim Keller makes a related observation in Every Good Endeavor, published in 2012. Work and achievement are genuinely good things, but the moment they become the source of our identity, they become idols. Marshall Goldsmith adds in What Got You Here Won't Get You There, published in 2007, the very patterns that produced success become, at a certain point, the greatest obstacles to growth. So Kim Mi Gang's hard-won wisdom is this some things cannot be solved while running. You have to stop and set them down. But stopping is terrifying because the moment we stop performing, the identity built on performance is suddenly exposed. The Westminster Shorter Catechism opens here. And that is the original KPI, key performance indicator, the measure by which you judge whether you're succeeding. And it was never issued by the market, never earned by decades of grinding. When that KPI becomes the one we live by, everything begins to shift. Hebrews 4 9 and 10 says, So then there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. You see, the rest of Hebrews 4 is not about sleep or vacation, it is about ceasing to prove yourself, because God has already declared you in Christ. Reformed theology has always understood this rest as fulfilled in Christ Himself. He is our Sabbath. We do not rest in order to be accepted, we rest because we are already accepted. John Calvin wrote in the very first lines of the Institutes that nearly all wisdom consists of two things, knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves, and that these cannot be separated, and self-knowledge that bypasses God leads us back to the mirror of other people's approval. Only God knowledge gives us a place to stand that does not shake. So Kim Mig shared something many public figures never said say out loud. At the height of her career, the speaking, the staff, the recognition, her inner world was in collapse. She decried it plainly. I was carrying unhappiness into every working day. In the depths of that season, she called her sister and said, Onye Najom's Halyojo meaning sister, please help me to live. It was a moment she stopped holding the weight alone and let someone see her. That became the turning point. Marcia Reynolds writes in Coach the Person, not the problem, published in 2020, that real change rarely begins with solving the presenting problem. It begins when a person feels genuinely seen, not for what they produce, but for who they are. Their one phone call opened exactly that space. Psalm 34 says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. So after that season, Kim Migang describes seeing the world differently, not as a stage on which she must prove herself, but as a constructed set whose rules no longer have to be treated as ultimate. The KPI changed from what can I achieve to do I know who I am? And am I living from that? David Paulison of CCF observed that the question of identity can only be rightly answered when we first know who God is. Self-knowledge follows God knowledge, not the other way around. So returning to Welch's insight, as long as other people's approval feels larger than God, fear of losing that approval will keep us running past every warning sign. When that fear loosens its grip, when the fear of the Lord takes its proper place, we find that we can at last stop. Well, that's it for today. Thanks for joining us. And I have some Jubilee Coach's questions on my homepage, jubileecoach.com under the live blog section. And um, yeah, I really appreciate your listening and supporting this program. Godspeed.