The RY Collection · Issue No. 8

Depletion Is Not Devotion

Before Your Next Yes — Do You Actually Have the Capacity for This? A Framework for Every Sector of Life.

By Ryan Younger · August 11, 2026

A Note on Purpose & Intent

Educational Purpose

This article is not a guilt trip. It is not a lecture about doing less or caring less. What it is — a clinically grounded, biblically rooted, and practically honest examination of one of the most overlooked patterns in human behavior: the habit of giving what you do not have, to people and responsibilities that were never yours to carry, while the things that were actually entrusted to you quietly run on empty.

This conversation belongs to every sector of life — every role, every background, every level of influence. And the framework that addresses it is just as universal as the pattern it names.

"The RY Solutions platform exists for one reason — to bring awareness and real solutions to everyday issues that are hidden, overlooked, or simply never talked about enough."

Awareness

Naming what has gone unspoken for too long

Education

Building the knowledge and wisdom to respond differently

Restoration

Returning to the order that was always meant for you

Teachability

Remaining open to growth at every stage

The Lesson Is Bigger Than Your Story

There is a reason this framework is not titled "How to Say No More Often." That framing would reduce a structural, deeply rooted pattern to a personality preference — and it is neither. What this article addresses is a way of operating that most people were either never taught, or were actively conditioned to believe was the only right way to live. The conditioning runs deep. It was modeled by parents, reinforced by faith communities, rewarded by workplaces, and celebrated by cultures that confuse depletion with devotion. And because it was never named, it was never examined.

It Is a Way of Life — Not Just a Season

This is not about one hard year, one difficult relationship, or one overwhelming season. For many people, chronic over-extension is not a circumstance — it is an identity. It is the only version of themselves they have ever known. The research on caregiver burnout confirms this: the longer the pattern continues without intervention, the more normalized it becomes — and the harder it is to recognize as a problem at all.

The Conditioning Was Real

Some people were never taught that their own health, household, and responsibilities were a legitimate priority. Others were taught the opposite — explicitly or implicitly — by people who needed them to be available, capable, and self-sacrificing at all times. That conditioning was not always malicious. But it was real. And it produced adults who feel guilty for resting, ashamed for having limits, and afraid that saying no means they have stopped caring.

Every Sector Is Represented Here

This is not a conversation for one type of person or one walk of life. The pattern appears in every sector without exception: in workplaces where employees absorb institutional dysfunction as a personal burden; in faith communities where members and leaders carry the weight of entire congregations alone; in families where one person becomes the default solution for every problem; in government and community organizations where individuals fill gaps that systems were built to handle. No sector is exempt. No role is immune.

The Full Picture Requires the Whole Truth

Real awareness is not selective. It does not examine one side of a pattern while ignoring the other. This article will name what is happening, why it is happening, what it costs, and what a different way of operating actually looks like — not as a theory, but as a framework that can be applied starting today, in every sector of life.

The Order That Changes Everything

In 1974, psychologist Herbert J. Freudenberger published the first clinical description of burnout in the Journal of Social Issues — describing it as the depletion of a person's inner resources through excessive demands placed on their energy, strength, and will. What Freudenberger observed in helping professionals is not limited to clinical settings. It is the lived experience of anyone who has spent years giving from a reserve that was never replenished — because they never established the order that makes replenishment possible. That order is not complicated. But it is intentional. And for most people, it has never been taught.

01

Health

Take care of your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health first.

02

Home

Get your own house in order before extending outward.

03

Responsibilities

Handle what has already been entrusted to you.

04

Routine

Create healthy rhythms and structures that sustain you.

05

Boundaries

Establish limits that protect what matters most.

06

Everything Else

Then determine what you genuinely have left to give.

This sequence is not a suggestion. It is a framework — and the research on sustainable capacity confirms what Scripture has always said: you cannot give what you do not have. The order matters because the order protects everything downstream. When health is neglected, the household suffers. When the household is out of order, the responsibilities entrusted to you suffer. When those responsibilities are neglected, the boundaries collapse — and everything else becomes a crisis. The sequence is not selfish. It is stewardship.

When Everything Feels Urgent, Nothing Gets Protected

The Priority Problem

One of the most clinically documented features of chronic over-extension is not that people do not care about their priorities — it is that they have never established them. Research on cognitive load and decision fatigue, including foundational work by psychologists Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, confirms that when a person operates without a clear hierarchy of priorities, every demand that arrives is processed at the same level of urgency. The result is not productivity. It is depletion. When everything is a priority, nothing is protected — and the things that matter most are quietly pushed out by the things that are simply loudest.

Priority Is Not Preference — It Is Protection

To establish a priority is not to say that other things do not matter. It is to say that this thing must be protected first — because without it, everything else is compromised. A person who has not protected their health cannot sustain their household. A person whose household is out of order cannot faithfully handle what has been entrusted to them. Priority is not selfishness dressed up in a framework. It is the structural decision that makes everything downstream possible.

The Absence of Priority Is Still a Decision

Many people believe they have not chosen their priorities — that life simply happened and they responded to what was in front of them. But the absence of a deliberate priority structure is itself a choice. And it is a choice with consequences. Research on self-regulation consistently shows that people who operate without explicit priorities default to responding to whoever is most persistent, most vocal, or most emotionally compelling — not to what is most important. The loudest need wins. And the quietest ones — often your own health, your own household, your own people — lose.

What Scripture Says About Order

The concept of divine order runs throughout Scripture — not as a rigid hierarchy of worth, but as a framework of stewardship. In 1 Timothy 5:8, Paul writes plainly: "Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." This is not a soft suggestion. It is a direct statement about the order of responsibility — and it places the household before the extended community. Not because the community does not matter, but because the household is the first and most immediate stewardship. Order is not optional. It is obedience.

Priority Must Be Practiced, Not Just Known

Knowing the right order of priorities and actually living by it are two entirely different things. Research on habit formation and behavioral change — including work by psychologist Wendy Wood, whose studies on habit and context found that nearly half of daily behaviors are habitual rather than consciously chosen — confirms that priority structures must be practiced consistently before they become the default response. A priority that exists only in theory is not a priority. It is an intention. And intentions, without structure and repetition, do not hold under pressure.

"The people closest to you — your health, your household, the ones entrusted to your care — are not competing with your priorities. They are supposed to be at the top of them."

The Question Nobody Stops to Ask

In a 2026 study published in Current Psychology, researchers developed and validated a People Pleasing Scale across two independent samples totaling nearly 1,900 participants. The study identified three core dimensions of people-pleasing behavior: a heightened sense of Responsibility for others, the Neglect of One's Own Needs, and an excessive orientation toward Others' Expectations. What the research confirmed is what many people already feel but rarely name: the compulsion to say yes is not simply generosity. It is a learned behavioral pattern — one that operates largely outside of conscious awareness, driven by guilt, obligation, fear of disapproval, and a deeply conditioned belief that one's value is tied to one's availability.

"Do I actually have the capacity for this?"

This is the question that most people never stop to ask — not because they do not care about the answer, but because the pattern of automatic agreement has become so embedded that the pause required to ask it never happens. The response comes before the reflection. The yes arrives before the inventory. And by the time the cost becomes visible, the commitment has already been made.

The Automatic Yes

Research on obligation and indebtedness, published in Nature Communications (2024), found that the brain processes perceived social debt through distinct neural pathways — producing feelings of guilt and obligation that motivate compliance even when compliance is not in the person's best interest. In plain terms: the brain is wired to respond to social pressure before the rational mind has had a chance to evaluate whether the response is wise. The automatic yes is not a character flaw. It is a neurological pattern — and like all patterns, it can be interrupted.

The Cost of Never Pausing

A landmark study published in JAMA (Schulz & Beach, 1999) — the Caregiver Health Effects Study — tracked 819 spouses over four years and found that caregivers who experienced strain had mortality risks 63% higher than non-caregiving controls. The study was not about dramatic circumstances. It was about ordinary people doing what they had always done — giving, helping, carrying — without ever stopping to ask whether they had the capacity to sustain it. The cost of never pausing is not abstract. It is measurable. And it is serious.

The Capacity Checklist

Christina Maslach, whose Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) became the most widely used clinical tool for measuring burnout, identified three core dimensions of the syndrome: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. What her decades of research consistently showed is that burnout does not arrive suddenly. It accumulates — one unchecked yes at a time, one unexamined obligation at a time, one season of depletion that was never addressed before the next one began. The checklist below is not a personality quiz. It is a clinical pause — the kind of honest self-inventory that most people skip because they are already in motion before the question is even formed.

1

Your Current Physical, Mental & Emotional State

How are you doing right now — not how you are performing, but how you are actually doing? Physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually? Honest self-assessment at this level is the first and most frequently skipped step.

2

What Already Has Your Attention

What is currently unresolved, unaddressed, or undone in your own life or household? Before extending outward, what is already waiting for you at home?

3

Your Actual Available Capacity

Do you have the time, energy, resources, and bandwidth for this — genuinely? Not theoretically, not on a good day, but right now, in this season, with what you are already carrying?

4

Whether This Is Actually Yours to Carry

Is this your responsibility — or are you absorbing what another capable adult should be handling? There is a meaningful difference between helping someone and carrying what belongs to them.

5

What Is Driving Your Yes

Are you saying yes because you genuinely want to and have the capacity to do so — or because you feel guilty, obligated, afraid of disappointing someone, or conditioned to believe that saying no makes you a bad person?

6

What It Will Cost You Afterward

If you say yes, what will it require of you in the days and weeks that follow? What will you have less of — and who else will feel that cost?

These six questions are not designed to produce a reason to say no. They are designed to produce an honest answer — whatever that answer is. The goal is not avoidance. The goal is awareness. And awareness, applied consistently, is what transforms a reactive pattern into a deliberate one.

The Most Underused Response

Most people operate with a binary: yes or no. What the research on compliance and social obligation reveals is that this binary is itself part of the problem — because it forces a decision before a decision has been properly made.

"Let me think about it, and I'll get back to you."

That sentence is not a delay tactic. It is not passive avoidance. It is the creation of a deliberate space between stimulus and response — and that space is where wisdom lives.

It Interrupts the Automatic Pattern

Research on compliance behavior consistently shows that the pressure to respond immediately is one of the primary drivers of regretted commitments. A single sentence that creates a pause — "let me think about it" — interrupts the neurological pattern of automatic agreement and returns the decision to the rational, evaluative part of the mind.

It Protects What Is Already Entrusted to You

Every yes given without capacity is a withdrawal from something else. Your health. Your household. Your time. The people who are already depending on you. The pause is not a refusal to care — it is a refusal to give from a reserve that belongs to someone else.

It Is Not Rejection — It Is Responsibility

1 Corinthians 4:2 states plainly: "Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful." Faithfulness is not measured by how many things you agreed to. It is measured by how well you stewarded what was actually entrusted to you. The pause is an act of faithfulness — to yourself, to the people already in your care, and to the God who entrusted them to you.

Boundaries Are Not the Absence of Love

One of the most persistent and damaging myths about boundaries is that they are a form of withdrawal — that to establish a limit is to reduce your love, your commitment, or your care. This myth is not only clinically inaccurate; it is theologically unsound. Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend, in their landmark work Boundaries (1992), define a boundary not as a wall that keeps people out, but as a property line that defines what you are responsible for and what you are not. The confusion between love and limitlessness is not a sign of a generous heart. It is a sign of a framework that was never properly built.

Family

You can love your family deeply, sacrificially, and consistently — and still have boundaries. Boundaries within a family do not signal that love has ended. They signal that love has matured enough to be honest about what is sustainable and what is not.

Church & Faith Community

You can serve in your church, give generously of your time and gifts, and be genuinely committed to your community — and still have boundaries. A pastor who carries the weight of an entire congregation alone is not more devoted. They are more depleted. And a depleted leader cannot lead well.

Workplace & Community

You can care about your coworkers, your community, and the people you serve — and still have boundaries. Absorbing what an organization or institution should address is not loyalty. It is a substitution that protects the system at the expense of the individual.

Generosity

You can be one of the most generous people in any room — and still have limits. Generosity given from a place of genuine capacity is sustainable. Generosity given from depletion, guilt, or obligation is not generosity. It is a transaction — and it costs more than it gives.

The Distinction Nobody Wants to Name

Love Is Not an Image — It Is a Pattern of Behavior

There is something that must be said clearly — because it applies in every sector, in every family, community, and in every relationship where the word "love" is used freely but the actions tell a different story. Boundaries are not the enemy of love. But the absence of genuine love — hidden behind the performance of it — is one of the most damaging patterns this platform exists to name.

Those Who Genuinely Love and Have Limits

There are people who deeply, sacrificially, and consistently love the people in their lives — their families, communities, and congregations — and who are learning, perhaps for the first time, that having limits does not make them less loving. It makes them more sustainable. These are the people this framework is designed to protect. They are not neglecting the people they love. They are learning to steward what they have so that the people they love receive the best of them — not what is left over after everyone else has taken their fill. Their love is real. Their limits are wisdom.

Those Who Perform Love Without Living It

And then there are those who build the appearance of family, loyalty, and love — while privately withholding the very things that make those words mean something: honesty, consistency, presence, protection, and mutual care. They show up for the image. They do things to be seen doing them. They maintain the appearance of relationship without the substance of it. They claim love with their words while their actions — consistently, over time — tell a completely different story. This is not a capacity problem. This is a character problem. And the people on the receiving end of it know the difference, even when they cannot yet name it.

"People treat you how they actually feel about you. Words are not the evidence. Patterns are."

Every person in a stable, grounded mindset understands this truth: words mean nothing without the actions that give them weight. You cannot claim to love someone you consistently neglect, deceive, or betray — and then point to occasional gestures as proof of your heart. Real love is not an event. It is not an image. It is not what you say at the right moment in front of the right people. It is what you do when no one is watching, when it costs you something, and when the person in front of you needs you to show up — not perform. The people you claim to love deserve the real thing. And the real thing requires both genuine care and the honest limits that protect it.

Three Distinctions That Will Change How You See This

Language shapes perception. And the language most people use to describe their over-extension — "I'm just a helper," "I'm a servant-leader," "I just love people" — is not wrong. But it is incomplete. Because there are distinctions embedded in each of those descriptions that, when left unnamed, allow a pattern of depletion to continue under the cover of virtue. These three distinctions are not semantic. They are structural. And once you see them clearly, you cannot unsee them.

Helping vs. Carrying

Galatians 6:2 instructs believers to "bear one another's burdens" — and three verses later, in Galatians 6:5, Paul writes that "each one should carry their own load." These are not contradictory statements. They are a precise theological distinction. The Greek word used in verse 2 (baros) refers to a crushing weight — the kind no one should carry alone. The word used in verse 5 (phortion) refers to a personal pack — the kind each person is responsible for carrying themselves. Helping someone with a crushing weight is an act of love. Carrying someone's personal pack indefinitely — while they watch — is not love. It is a substitution that prevents growth and depletes the helper.

Serving vs. Depleting

There is a meaningful clinical difference between service that is given from a place of genuine capacity and service that is extracted from a person who has nothing left. Maslach's research on burnout identified emotional exhaustion — the depletion of one's emotional resources — as the first and most critical dimension of the burnout syndrome. When a person reaches emotional exhaustion, they are no longer serving. They are surviving. And the people they are supposed to be serving are receiving the residue of a person who has already given everything they had.

Love vs. No Limits

Love, in both clinical and biblical frameworks, is not the absence of limits. In 1 Peter 4:10, believers are instructed to use their gifts "to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace." The word steward (oikonomos in Greek) describes a person who manages resources on behalf of an owner — with accountability, with intentionality, and with limits. A steward who gives away everything the master entrusted to them is not generous. They are unfaithful. Love that has no limits is not love at its fullest expression. It is love without wisdom — and wisdom is what makes love last.

Not everything you are capable of carrying is yours to carry.

This Is Universal — Every Sector, Every Role

The pattern this article describes is not a personal failing. It is a systemic one — and it appears in every sector of human life without exception. A 2020 review published in the Annual Review of Psychology (Schulz et al.) confirmed that caregiving as chronic stress exposure produces measurable psychological and physical health consequences across populations — regardless of the setting in which the caregiving occurs. The sector changes. The role changes. The cost does not.

Workplace

In organizational settings, the pattern manifests as role overload — the condition in which an employee absorbs responsibilities that exceed their defined role, often because the organization has failed to address a structural gap. Maslach's research identified role overload as one of the six primary mismatches between a person and their work environment that drives burnout. The employee who stays late every night, covers for colleagues, and absorbs institutional dysfunction as a personal burden is not more committed. They are more at risk.

Faith Communities

Research on clergy burnout — documented in studies including Fichter's sociological analysis (1984) — has consistently found that pastors and church leaders are among the most vulnerable populations for chronic depletion. The expectation of perpetual availability, the weight of congregational need, and the theological framing of self-sacrifice as virtue create a context in which limits are not only discouraged — they are often treated as a failure of faith. The result is leaders who are spiritually depleted, emotionally exhausted, and unable to give what their communities need most.

Families

Within family systems, the pattern often concentrates in one person — the one who is most capable, responsible, or most conditioned to carry. Parents who rescue adult children from the natural consequences of their decisions, siblings who absorb the dysfunction of the family system, and caregivers who neglect their own health to manage the needs of others are all operating from the same framework: that their capacity is unlimited, and that their value is measured by their availability. The research is clear that this framework is not sustainable — and that the people it is meant to help are often not helped by it in the long run.

Communities & Government

At the community and institutional level, the pattern appears when individuals fill gaps that systems were designed and funded to address. The community volunteer who becomes the unofficial social worker, the neighborhood leader who absorbs the failures of local government, the nonprofit worker who gives beyond their capacity because the need is real and the resources are not — all of them are operating in a space where the system's limits have been transferred to the individual. The framework applies here too. Because the need is everywhere — and so is the cost of carrying it without capacity.

The framework applies everywhere — because the need is everywhere. And the solution is the same regardless of the sector: honest self-assessment, a clear sequence of priorities, and the willingness to ask the question that changes everything.

You Don't Have to Lose Yourself to Prove Your Heart

There is a version of devotion that the world celebrates and Scripture does not actually require. It is the version that equates love with losing yourself completely — that measures the quality of your care by how much of yourself you have given away. It is the version that produces people who are physically depleted, emotionally exhausted, relationally unavailable, and spiritually dry — and who still feel guilty for not doing more. This article has been building toward one clear statement: that version of devotion is not the standard. It never was.

You Can Still Show Up

Establishing a framework of priorities — health, home, responsibilities, routine, boundaries, then everything else — does not make you less available to the people you love. It makes you sustainably available. The difference between showing up depleted and showing up with genuine capacity is not a small one. The people in your life feel it. And the research on caregiver effectiveness confirms it: the quality of care given from a place of capacity is measurably different from the care given from a place of exhaustion.

You Don't Have to Rescue Everyone

Proverbs 4:23 instructs: "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." The word translated "guard" in the Hebrew (natsar) carries the meaning of watching over, protecting, and preserving — the way a sentinel guards a city. The heart is not just the seat of emotion. In the biblical framework, it is the source of everything that flows outward: your decisions, your relationships, your capacity to give, your ability to lead. A heart that is not guarded cannot give what it does not have. You cannot rescue everyone. And you were never asked to.

Protect What Is Entrusted to You

Luke 12:48 states: "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." The standard is not how much you gave to everyone who asked. The standard is how faithfully you stewarded what was actually entrusted to you. Your health was entrusted to you. Your household was entrusted to you. The people in your immediate care were entrusted to you. Faithfulness begins there — not with the next request that arrives at your door.

Closing Prayer

A Prayer for Ordered Hearts

For the reader who recognized something true in these pages — not a condemnation of their past choices, but a clear invitation toward something better:

Father, we come before You not as people who have it figured out, but as people who are learning, again, what it means to be faithful with what You have actually placed in our hands. Grant us the honesty to take inventory without looking away — to look at what we have agreed to, what we have absorbed, what we have quietly neglected — and to see it clearly, without excuse and without despair.

Where we have treated our bodies as machines to be run until they break — remind us that they are temples, entrusted to us for Your purposes, and that their maintenance is not selfishness but obedience. Where we have let everything that felt urgent push aside everything that actually mattered — and let the noise of every need drown out what was actually ours to handle — give us the wisdom to know the difference.

Where we have allowed our homes to become afterthoughts — the last place we bring our energy, the last relationship we invest in — restore what has been thinned by our misplaced priorities. The people under our roofs did not ask for what was left over. They were entrusted to us. Let us receive that entrustment with the gravity it deserves.

For the one who has over-extended, who knows privately that their yes has outrun their capacity, who is tired in a way that a single night's rest will not fix:

Father, what they need is not more willpower. They need wisdom — wisdom to recognize what was never theirs to carry in the first place, and the clarity to tell the difference between the call You placed on their life and the weight others have added on top of it. Give them the courage to make one ordered choice today — and then to keep making that choice, day after day, for the rest of their lives. Let putting what matters most first become the way they naturally live — not a daily struggle, but a settled decision they never have to revisit.

For every community, institution, household, and leader represented in these pages:

Father, build cultures where the person who pauses before committing is seen as thoughtful, not unwilling. Where the language of capacity and stewardship is spoken openly, without embarrassment. Where those in authority model the order they ask others to maintain. Where no one is praised for burning out in service of a system that could have been structured differently. Let every environment that has taken more than it should begin the slow work of recalibration. And let every individual who reads these words leave with one thing more than they had before: the conviction that guarding what You have entrusted to them is not a retreat from love — it is the very thing that keeps love alive.

In Jesus' name. Amen.

Sources & Further Reading

Clinical & Psychological Research

  • Freudenberger, H. J. (1974). Staff Burn-Out. Journal of Social Issues, 30(1), 159–165.
  • Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1981). The measurement of experienced burnout. Journal of Occupational Behaviour, 2, 99–113.
  • Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job Burnout. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 397–422.
  • Schulz, R., & Beach, S. R. (1999). Caregiving as a Risk Factor for Mortality: The Caregiver Health Effects Study. JAMA, 282(23), 2215–2219.
  • Schulz, R., Beach, S. R., Czaja, S. J., Martire, L. M., & Monin, J. K. (2020). Family Caregiving for Older Adults. Annual Review of Psychology, 71, 635–659.
  • Gérain, P., & Zech, E. (2022). A Harmful Care: The Association of Informal Caregiver Burnout With Depression, Subjective Health, and Violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence.
  • Tomasello, M. (2019). The moral psychology of obligation. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
  • Lemay, E. P., & Meleshko, M. (2024). The psychological, computational, and neural foundations of indebtedness. Nature Communications.
  • Schaufeli, W. B. (2017). Burnout: A Short Socio-Cultural History. In Burnout, Fatigue, Exhaustion. Springer.

Books Referenced

  • Cloud, H., & Townsend, J. (1992). Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life. Zondervan. (Referenced for the clinical definition of a boundary as a property line of responsibility — distinct from its application to institutional dynamics in Issue No. 3.)
  • Tawwab, N. G. (2021). Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself. TarcherPerigee.

Biblical References

  • Galatians 6:2 — "Carry each other's burdens" (baros — a crushing weight) — NIV
  • Galatians 6:5 — "Each one should carry their own load" (phortion — a personal pack) — NIV
  • 1 Corinthians 4:2 — "Those who have been given a trust must prove faithful" — NIV
  • 1 Peter 4:10 — "Use your gifts to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace" — NIV
  • Proverbs 4:23 — "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it" — NIV
  • Luke 12:48 — "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded" — NIV
  • Matthew 11:28–30 — "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest" — NIV

About the Author

Ryan Younger is the founder of The RY Collection — a platform devoted to naming what is true, especially when truth has been buried, avoided, softened, or left unspoken for too long. Her work examines the hidden patterns people feel but often do not say out loud: the cost of chronic over-extension, the quiet damage of carrying what was never yours, and the ways depletion reshapes families, workplaces, faith settings, and relationships. She writes from the conviction that order is not a retreat from love — it is the condition that makes love sustainable. And that the people entrusted to us deserve the best of us, not what remains after everyone else has taken their share.

About This Series

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