Sometimes the collapse is sudden. Sometimes it’s gradual enough to be mistaken for personal failure. Sometimes the system appears to function for years before quietly giving way under conditions it was never designed to hold.
In some cases, the problem is not misuse or lack of discipline. It’s that the system itself rests on assumptions that no longer match the shape of everyday life—if they ever did.
Most modern productivity frameworks share a quiet premise:
that life becomes manageable once it is organized correctly.
Make everything visible. Break it down. Prioritize. Execute.
When this works, it produces relief—sometimes even hope. The sense that anxiety can be tamed through technique. That clarity is a matter of process. That the self can stand above the demands of life and impose order through sufficient rigor.
This premise holds best under specific conditions: stable schedules, predictable energy, limited interruption, problems that resolve rather than persist. In those environments, structure can be genuinely helpful.
But many lives do not unfold there.
At a certain point, the central question shifts. It is no longer How can this be managed more efficiently? but something closer to What is actually being asked of me here, now, with the limits that exist?
That question does not translate easily into workflows or task hierarchies.
Modern life does not arrive in discrete, processable units.
It arrives as a torrent.
Messages, obligations, crises, requests—often layered, often simultaneous, often unresolved—move faster than reflection can keep pace. The volume alone exceeds what most systems can meaningfully contain.
This shows up even among highly competent people. Executives, professionals, caregivers—many move from meeting to meeting, inbox to inbox, decision to decision, not because of disorganization or laziness, but because the inputs never stop long enough for discernment to catch up.
The Desert Fathers anticipated something like this:
“A time is coming when people will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”
In a culture structured around reaction, pause appears irresponsible.
In an economy that equates worth with output, restraint looks like failure.
Getting Things Done was published in 2001.
The iPhone arrived five years later.
The information environment these systems were designed for no longer exists. But the deeper mismatch is not merely technological—it is anthropological.
Many productivity systems assume a self capable of standing above life, surveying it, and bringing it into order through technique. Control is treated as both goal and virtue.
That assumption collapses when life introduces realities that cannot be optimized away:
Some suffering does not resolve. Some wounds do not close. Some lives are shaped irrevocably by limits that no amount of organization can remove.
At that point, technique dries out.
Grace preserves.
Jesus names a reality productivity culture avoids:
“You cannot serve both God and mammon.”
Not should not.
Cannot.
This is not moral exhortation. It is diagnosis.
Mammon names a system of extraction—endless productivity, constant availability, measurable output. It takes everything offered and demands more tomorrow.
The Kingdom operates differently. Seek first the Kingdom, and these things will be added. Not optimized. Not earned. Added.
This does not promise ease. It signals a shift in center of gravity.
Saint Joseph did not manage his way out of danger. He responded. He listened. He fled in the night without a transition plan or framework to justify the disruption.
Most lives will not involve flight into Egypt. But the same tension appears daily: the world’s metrics versus what actually matters. Production versus presence. Control versus trust.
These cannot be balanced indefinitely.
A choice is always being made.
A small notebook helps.
Lists help.
Structure still has a place.
And then reality intervenes.
Plans shift. Energy runs out. Someone needs attention. Something breaks. Decisions are made imperfectly, in motion, without full clarity.
At certain moments, it becomes possible—briefly—to pause and ask a simpler question than What should be done next?
What is actually being asked of me right now?
Not by the system.
Not by the culture.
But by the life immediately present.
Sometimes the answer is clear. Often it is not. Movement happens anyway, guided less by certainty than by intention. Fidelity replaces mastery.
This way of living is slower. Messier. Less impressive.
It does not produce inbox zero.
But it preserves presence.
Some problems are not solvable.
That does not make them meaningless.
The cross is not a solution to suffering. It is God’s refusal to abandon the unsolvable parts of it.
To stand at the foot of the cross is not to fix anything. It is to attach wounds to Christ’s wounds and remain human in a world that rewards disintegration.
Wounded apples must be dipped in honey—not dried out and optimized.
Grace is not a technique. It does not replace clinical care. It names a different category of healing, one that begins precisely where checklists end.
A perfect system is not required.
What may be required is letting go of the belief that the right system will save what the system itself erodes.
The torrent is real.
The overwhelm is real.
But so is the anchor.
Not control.
Not mastery.
Trust.
The world may interpret this posture as irresponsibility or withdrawal.
It is neither.
It is a refusal to drown.
“Christ Calms the Storm” by Eugène Delacroix
There’s a conversation that keeps not happening in contemporary therapeutic culture—not because it’s forbidden, but because the category for it has been quietly removed from view.
The observation isn’t new, but it keeps surfacing in different forms. Not as polemic, but as lived experience seeking language. This isn’t an argument against medicine, therapy, or psychiatry. It’s a noticing: something about the architecture of modern healing assumes suffering is always a malfunction requiring external intervention, technique, expertise, optimization.
This works beautifully for many people. But there’s a remainder—and the people in that remainder aren’t arguing that grace replaces medicine. They know medicine saves lives. They’re pointing out that grace has been removed from the list entirely.
(This isn’t about replacing therapy with religion—that’s its own problem. Grace isn’t a technique that competes with clinical care. It’s something else entirely.)
A recent theological reflection quoted Francis de Sales: wounded apples must be dipped in honey to be preserved. Unwounded apples can be dried, stored, optimized. But a bruised apple will rot unless it’s immersed in something preservative.
Technique dries. Grace preserves.
Modern Christianity—especially institutional Christianity—has quietly decided it prefers dried apples: functional, shelf-stable, productive, low-maintenance. Wounded people don’t fit the supply chain.
Secular therapeutic culture has made the same choice, for different reasons.
Some theological work being done in this space isn’t proposing a new self-help system.
It’s recovering something older and more dangerous: the cross is not a solution. It is not optimization. It is not functional restoration.
It’s God saying: “I am with you here, not after you become acceptable.”
That’s not therapy. That’s accompaniment. And the difference matters enormously for people whose suffering is chronic, structural, relational, moral, spiritual—or bound up with power, dependence, and humiliation.
For people who are wounded rather than merely malfunctioning, technique alone is not only insufficient. It can be alienating. Sometimes violent.
The claim being made isn’t that the cross should replace everything. It’s far more modest—and therefore more devastating:
Any account of healing that cannot make room for the wounded without first demanding competence is incomplete.
A sane, humane checklist would include:
Right now, that last item is either sentimentalized, privatized, or treated as decorative. Not operative.
The omission is not neutral. It causes harm.
Modern theological discourse has become so dissociated from anything human that we’ve forgotten there’s healing at the foot of the cross. Not metaphorically. Actually.
One writer puts it plainly: “Philosophically, I think it’s the only thing. Practically, I’m just asking that it be on the checklist.”
That’s not heresy. That’s humility.
And the fact that such a statement sounds radical—that insisting grace at least belong on the list of healing resources feels like a dangerous claim—tells us something about how completely the monopoly on meaning has been ceded to models that cannot account for accompaniment.
None of this invalidates therapy or medicine. Both have saved countless lives.
But consider the vision: bringing burned-out survivors of institutional religion together to attach their wounds to Christ’s wounds, creating fellowship precisely in the places where technique has nothing left to offer. This isn’t competing with clinical care.
It’s naming what clinical care, by design, cannot do: meet people who will never be optimizable and say, “You belong here. As you are. With no improvement required.”
That’s the hole in the system. Not a flaw exactly. More like a category error that has calcified into common sense.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The question isn’t whether grace belongs in healing. The question is how we ever convinced ourselves we could have a complete account of healing without it.
Boyd Camak 