The exhaustion of the climb evidences the fact that we’re climbing. Therefore, I don’t ever wish to be exhausted by being exhausted.

I have sat in the impossible places that existed leagues beyond the reach of the prose of men, the touch of friends, and the encouragement of family. And in these horribly famished places where hope languished and desperation ruled, I eventually fell to exhaustion and laid my life in the frigid embrace of an awaiting death only to find that instead I had fallen into the warm hands of a loving God. And while these words are the prose of yet another man, the hands that they speak of are not.

I came to the end of myself fighting to birth the beginning of a dream. But what really brought me to the end of myself was that I was foolish enough to fight for a dream without including the God that had given it to me.

One day I found myself sitting utterly exhausted and wholly spent from this failed journey to secure everything that I wanted. And when the tears abated and my vision finally cleared, I was astounded to find that I had always been surrounded by everything that I needed. And I have not cried since.

If I get up just one less time than the number of times I’ve been knocked down, I have done one of the most devastating things possible; I have halted my life at that very spot.

What I’m left with when I have nothing left is the satisfaction of knowing that I left nothing for myself in the service of someone else.

Coming to the end of ourselves is one of the best ways that we can come to an understanding of ourselves.

If your goal did not exhaust you on the way to achieving it, I doubt the credibility of the goal.

It is in the ‘exhaustion’ of getting to the goal that we too often forget the ‘elation’ of achieving the goal. And because that’s the case, too often we forfeit both.