In the 3rd century, one of the spiritual gifts that was actively prayed for was the spiritual gift of martyrdom. That’s right, people would pray that they would be given the spiritual gift of dying (and dying well). There are a lot of spiritual gift inventories out there right now that will tell you if your gift is hospitality or prophecy or prayer or acts or service or whatever, and yet, martyrdom doesn’t seem to make the list. Why? Well, I think it may be because we have martyrdom covered. 
“Martyrdom” comes from the Greek word that means “to give witness”. We may not be burned at the stake or fed to lions or crucified upside down, but we’re dying to give witness. We’re dying to give witness to how good and important we are. We’re dying to give witness to how attractive and healthy we are. We’re dying to show how we are positively impacting the world and those around us. But we’re dying nonetheless. We’re burned at the desk, we’re fed to our families, we’re crucified upside down by our expectations of ourselves.
The difference is that you can look at a stake to burn people on or a hungry lion or a crucifixion and think, “that’s a bad thing,” pretty easily. But our careers, our families, and our expectations of ourselves aren’t inherently bad – they can just get out of control. And they do despite their inherent goodness. Let me repeat that because it is seemingly a difficult concept for people to understand. Work, good. Family, good. Ambition, good. Lavishing gratuitous attention to any of those things or all of them at once, bad.
The problem that we have here is that we see this as a life or death dichotomy. We’re alive or we’re dead. We’re sinner or we’re saint. We’re giving witness to ourselves or to Jesus. And we do that because it’s simple. So in this simple framework, God calls us to love Him or our family – we have to die for one or the other. In this simple framework God calls us to love Him or our work – we have to die for one or the other. In this simple framework, God calls us to love Him or our ambition – we have to die for one or the other. And if we’re honest, we’re probably not choosing Him. There are martyrs all around, just none giving witness to God.
But what if God’s framework isn’t that simple? What if God allows us to keep our families, our work, and our ambition? What if God’s concern is actually that we do those things well? What if the thing that God is calling you to kill isn’t yourself, but your assumption that He can’t be a part of all of the things that you believe are important? Jesus’ death on the cross has redeemed our lives. Our lives. Our lives with their work and ambition and families and everything else. Not just our “theoretical life,” not some goofy mystic new agey “life force”. Jesus redeemed your life. Your LIFE. YOUR life. He bought it, gave it back to you. He just wants to be a part of it, and for you to be a part of His life (which is good news because His life is eternal).
So stop killing yourself and engage in the martyrdom of the living redeemed people of God who have been given their lives back.