When It’s More Than We Can Handle
We’ve all heard that sweet saying, “God never gives you more than you can handle”. But I have come to wonder about this. It sounds so nice and safe by worldly standards, but is that the God we serve?
Sometimes, I have found, it is more than we can “handle”. Can anyone really “handle” a terminal diagnosis? Or the news that their child is dead? Or the pain of abuse? Or even the day to day struggles that we all face? Can we really “handle” anything?
We are given more than we can handle all the time. So what happens then? What happens when you are given more than you can “handle”? What happens when your life seems to be crumbling all around you and people keep telling you that you can handle it because “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle”. What then?
That is where the beauty of our relationship with Christ comes into play.
I want you to take a moment to navigate from this page and read a blog post written by an incredibly faithful woman who is dying of cancer.
http://www.mundanefaithfulness.com/home/2015/2/10/if-i-tried
I read this, this morning and immediately my wheels began to turn. I realized as I read, that this journey Kara is on is WAY more than she can handle. But thankfully we are not called to handle the pain that life has in store, we are only called to trust in our savior’s goodness and let him take the wheel.
I don’t want to believe that I am never given more than I can handle. That is meaningless to me. I want to be given more than I can handle constantly so that I am always in need of Christ in the deepest way possible. I don’t ever want to fool myself into believing that I can “handle” it without Him.
-Psalm 23:4-
“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
Thank you Liz! This was beautiful!
so I’m not sure what you mean by we are not called to handle the pain of life, well who handles it, maybe I and God together, but I believe I have to have a part in it, even if it’s just the trusting part. I deal with tinnitus and hearing problems on a daily basis, have medical support as much as possible, but the fear of what life may throw at me next keeps me anxious, and I just get tired sometimes. When it comes to trust, I’m still not sure what I’m trusting God for, certainly not to deliver me from my health issues, so to strengthen me to deal with them better? I always read about trusting God, but what specifically am I trusting him to do?
Yes I hear you on this one. I struggle with this too. At the end of the day we are trusting that God is good even when everything else looks so bleak. It is tough though, really hard a lot of times.