All Progress in the Christian life is predicated upon disillusionment.
. . . the Bible does not say, "God will never give you more than you can bear."
Au contraire, God is committed to doing precisely the opposite and that is the very dilemma which so often brings us into conflict with Him and His above-the-line purposes for our lives. Nobody, it seems is exempt from this treatment. The Apostle Paul, in his writings, spells it out with chilling clarity - "For we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and He will deliver us. On Him we have set our hope that He will deliver us again." (2 Cor. 1:8-10)
. . . Depression is and can only be the product of misplaced dependency. As long as we still believe ourselves to be independent selves and we do not count ourselves dead to sin, the devil has an opportunity to dwell in the mortal flesh. Burnout occurs at the point where reality does not match expectation. In any area in which we invest our creativity, passion, heart or ability to make a contribution with a view to either consciously or unconsciously derive identity, value or self-worth apart from Christ, we have entered a burnout zone.
Burnout is the divine antidote to bring a believer into full union recognition with God through love. In order to accomplish this, there must be a necessary purging of the sensory part of the soul from its attachments to that which is not God.
-- Paul Anderson-Walsh, The Bonsai Conspiracy
