I can’t fix my family.
I can’t keep my job.
I can’t salvage my reputation.
I can’t protect those I love.
I can’t stand the pain.
I can’t stop drinking. Can’t stop binge-eating, binge-watching, binge-spending, binge-working. Can’t stop looking at porn.
I can’t find a spouse. Can’t stay married. Can’t forgive my ex. Can’t make a friend, manage my temper, save money, be grateful.
I can’t get my skin/teeth/hair/thighs to look right. I can’t get no satisfaction.
Can’t cure my cancer through positive thinking.
Can’t please my parents.
Can’t have kids.
Can’t get the kids to leave.
Can’t get my child to come home.
Can’t open up. Can’t shut up.
Can’t sleep. Can’t stop worrying.
Can’t quit comparing. Can’t feel joy.
Can’t see my abs. Can’t get enough 👍s, ❤️s, 🏆s.
I can’t understand what I do, for I have the desire to do good but cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but instead I do the evil I do not want to do.
I can’t bear criticism. Can’t stop criticizing. Can’t believe. Can’t walk away. Can’t make myself want to live. Can’t fix the world. Can’t fix myself.
I can’t run the show.
Embracing Powerlessness: Why We Need God’s Strength
In grad school, although I was studying to become a clinical psychologist, I started working at a Baptist church. I discovered then that I loved to preach . . . until one weekend when the sermon wasn’t going well and I started to feel anxious and dizzy, and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the platform, looking into the concerned faces of the congregation. I had fainted in the middle of my own sermon. What made it worse was this was not a Pentecostal church where you get credit for that sort of thing. These were Baptists, and they expected preachers to stay on their feet.
I was in the middle of finals, about to get married, and preparing to travel overseas for a year. I thought perhaps this was a one-time occurrence due to all the stress in my life. I went to get help from the dean of my program, Arch Hart, a psychologist who wrote books on stress management.
But a year later, the very next time I got up to preach, I fainted again. I also fainted a third time in a stressful private conversation.
I went back to Arch. “This is not good,” I said. “I can’t preach if I faint regularly. It makes people nervous. The more scared of fainting I am, the worse my preaching gets, and the worse my preaching gets, the more scared I am. Give me more stress reduction exercises. I want a guarantee this won’t happen again. I will try harder not to faint.”
“Not a good plan,” he said. It turns out that if you have a fainting problem, trying really hard not to faint actually makes you more likely to faint.
He went on. “Here’s an idea. Next time you preach, just set a chair out on the platform. Then, when you’re about to faint, sit down. It’s much harder to faint when you’re sitting down. Plus, you don’t have so far to fall.”
“But it would be humiliating,” I said. “People keep telling me to just trust God, to have more faith. This would be a public reminder of my weakness.”
“Yes.”
So in my early days of preaching, I preached standing next to an empty chair. And when things didn’t go well, I would sit down.
Forty years later, I wonder now if fainting was perhaps a divine invitation to recognize that preaching, like life, is not something that can be mastered. It was only the beginning of the battle to resist acknowledging my weakness, which continues to this day. My final church job many decades later ended in a much darker experience of weakness and defeat and humiliation than the first one. And there was no chair big enough to hold me up that time.
Human agency is a wonderful gift. We are not passive victims in life. We are called to courage and initiative. And yet . . .
I have experienced powerlessness in the areas of life that are most important to me. I have experienced deeply painful failure as a parent. I have experienced deeply painful failure in my calling as a pastor. This has left brokenness around me and within me that I cannot solve and cannot fix.
This is my reality. My life must incorporate this painful, broken weakness if it is to be a life at all.
Kate Bowler is a brilliant scholar and writer who was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer as a young wife and mom, kept alive six months at a time through immunotherapy. She writes of how she fought to be in control from childhood and doesn’t know how to stop:
Surrendering Control: How God Can Transform Our Struggles
Control is a drug, and we are all hooked. . . . When I was little, my dad would read stories from Greek mythology, and I loved one most of all—that prideful King Sisyphus, who was doomed to roll a boulder up an impossibly steep hill only to have it roll down again. He would discover for all eternity that not every burden can be shouldered. Yes, I would think, learning nothing. But at least he kept trying.1
God’s Ability to Restore: Trusting His Power When We Feel Weak
Life is not about making it to the top. It’s about hitting bottom and handing the boulder over to someone else.
When we try to run the show, we only make things worse. We will need help that comes from beyond ourselves. There is another ancient story about another King who rolled a stone away—only when he rolled it, it stayed rolled.
If you don’t feel much faith, it’s okay. Desperation will do until faith comes along. If you don’t feel much desperation, just keep living. Desperation will be provided. Even Sisyphus eventually gets sick and tired of being sick and tired.
The True Spiritual Journey: Allowing God to Manage What We Cannot
The true spiritual journey depends on our sincere, desperate recognition that we are not in control. Author Richard Rohr writes, “Until you bottom out, and come to the limits of your own fuel supply, there is no reason for you to switch to a higher octane of fuel. . . . Until and unless there is a person, situation, event, idea, conflict, or relationship that you cannot ‘manage,’ you will never find the True Manager. So God makes sure that several things will come your way that you cannot manage on your own.”2
God can create the world. Make the sun rise. Answer prayer. Move mountains.
He can provide wisdom. Offer hope. Restore moral sanity.
He can guide the confused. Comfort the lonely. Liberate the oppressed. Embrace the stigmatized. Topple rulers. Bless the humble.
Part seas. Calm storms. Invent beetles.
Bring justice. Forgive guilt. Redeem the past. Secure the future.
Make life. Give breath. Feed sparrows. Clothe lilies. Know everything. Be everywhere. Love everybody. Give the knowledge of his will and the power to carry it out.
He can run the show.
1. Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (New York: Random House, 2018), 84-85.
2. Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2011), 3, emphasis his.
Adapted from Steps: A Guide to Transforming Your Life When Willpower Isn’t Enough by John Ortberg. Copyright © 2025. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries. All rights reserved.
