Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Jeff Parrott.

Many of us are suffering under the weight of acting like full-time performers.

Now, we might not be on a physical stage in front of an audience.

We might not be in front of cameras, literally, but our desires, our thoughts, our habits,

they betray the reality that we are indeed performing before a watching world. In performance

mode, we carefully manicure not only our appearance and our production,

but we manicure how those things are received by other people. In performance mode,

we willingly subject ourselves to a barrage of messages that incline us towards self-improvement

and self-importance.

Alexandra Schwartz describes our performance-bent culture this way in a New Yorker article.

She writes,

In our current era of nonstop technological innovation, fuzzy, wishful thinking has yielded to the hard doctrine of personal optimization.

Self-help gurus need not be charlatans peddling snake oil.

Many are psychologists with impressive academic pedigrees and a commitment to scientific

methodologies or tech entrepreneurs with enviable records of success in life

and business, what they're selling is metrics. It's no longer enough to imagine our way to a better

state of body or mind. We must now chart our progress, count our steps, log our sleep rhythms, tweak our diets,

record our negative thoughts, then analyze the data, recalibrate, and repeat.

And that cycle of constant performance might sound familiar to you.

And you don't have to follow the latest influencer to fall into that cycle

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