You Can't Handle It

    I am finding, as I grow older, that I am hungry, no STARVING for authenticity in my pursuit of Jesus, and to fellowship (talk, eat, pray, laugh, cry) with other people who are starving for the same menu. I have found that too often, I settle for junk food in my faith when I should be eating healthier.

   God's people have settled for junk food platitudes that subtly alter God's truth, and our perception of Who He Is. I see it all the time.  The fast-food drive-thru windows are often the same repeat diet:  the Facebook meme, the ladies circle of gossip-disguised-as-prayer-requests, the typography beautifully spilled across a photograph loaded with meaning - you know the one, you and I felt really good about it when we pinned it to our Faith boards last week-...the things we say to one another meaning to comfort, meaning to calm, meaning to strengthen and carry one another's burdens…meaning well.

But sometimes, they are JUST NOT TRUE.

One particular NOT-TRUTH that I have tasted, tried, puckered at, and downright chewed the cud on is this:  God never gives you more than you can handle.  

    This one.  This one really strokes the human ego. This one is not nutritious.  This one is like junk food advertising itself as organic and low-cal.  This one limits the Almighty God.  It piles me with pride, or insecurity, depending on which way the wind is blowing on that particular day.  But ultimately, it's just discouraging. A small lie that erodes my view of my God and myself.

    As for my own life, this NOT TRUTH has bounced along the pathway of my life for a good long time.  Countless people encouraged me with this phrase when I was expecting my first child, working multiple jobs and trying to figure out how to finish college and get married.  I heard it again as a brand new wife and mom, having petty fights with my new husband and suffering from lack of sleep and hormone overload.  I heard it again when the second and third children came along; when the toddlers starting painting on the walls with bodily fluids, flushing entire rolls of toilet paper down the toilet, and threw tantrums that involved running into the neighborhood street, and breaking two closet doors. With his heels. And his fists.  I heard it when potty training meant my second son triumphantly grinned at me from the kitchen counter after pooping in the kitchen sink, and my third son changed his own diaper using his bed sheets, beanbag chair and carpet for wipes. My husband actually got to 'handle' that one, bless his heart and clorox-ed hands.
     It doesn't matter what season of life you're in.  Single, married, widowed, a house full of children or dogs or if it's just you. Taking care of parents, grandparents, dogs, cats or fetuses; trying to appease bosses, teachers, professors or parents...we all have moments when we come around the corner, our jaws drop to the floor and we think, "THIS IS JUST MORE THAN I CAN HANDLE RIGHT NOW!!!"

(Perspective check:  married to a very, very good man, three healthy children, college education, roof over my head, well-fed, clothed, and always provided for.) I'm not whining about my wonderful life.  I am just highlighting the more stressful times when people came alongside me, and meaning well, reminded me that God was in charge up there somewhere.
 
Looking Up
      The first problem with the phrase, "God never gives you more than you can handle," is it skews my perception of God.  I begin to view God sitting above the circle of the earth (this part is Biblical Isaiah 40:22),  looking down on me and measuring me for capacity-for-stress like a seamstress measures me for an alteration (not in the Bible).  I begin to see God as a distant test administrator who just wants to see what I'm made of.  When I do well, I assign him the human characteristics of a proud parent.  When I fail, I assume he must just be so disappointed in me.

Looking in the Mirror
      The second problem with the phrase is that it skews my perception of myself. "...more than I can handle."  Webster says this of "Handle" - it's a verb - means to manage, be in charge of, deal with. When I think of myself as a manager, I think of a hierarchy of labor division where the highest up, in this case God, has delegated work or stress, and has left the building! We are now just to carry out tasks and report back later.
    And while I do agree that God calls me to stewardship, to the management of the gifts He has given me (material, spiritual, relational, ability)  He promises that He will never leave me, He will never forsake me.(Joshua 1:5, Hebrews 13:5)  I'm engraved on the palms of His hands (Isaiah 49:16), which smarty pants Beth Moore pointed out to me: he's holding me so tight that it cuts Him…maybe it looks like a hole from a nail.
 
      When I think of God as a stress delegator, and me as a stress manager, the wind of self begins to blow.  It blows from all directions, depending on my circumstances, hormones, emotions, etc.  I'm not crazy (repeat to self, daily), but my brain has conversations with itself. Self speak, the inner dialogue, whatever you want to call it.  You do it too, don't lie. (You're not crazy…repeat to self, daily).   On a good week, when the stars are aligned, and the brothers are playing and solving problems beautifully and none of them are bleeding,  I take myself aside, and admit, "Wow, my children are so well behaved.  I am really a good parent." (pride…snide pride)

Looking Around
     Then a few days later, I begin comparing myself to a mom of a child with (colic, sleeping problems, special needs, difficult or unexplainable behaviors, fill in the blank) and I mutter to myself  "Wow. God must really believe in her, and think she's worthy of raising a child with needs like that.  You must have just patted me on the head, and not thought much of my abilities when you gave me my child who sleeps like a dream, eats green vegetables and mostly does what I tell him." (Self doubt. Insecurity)
      The winds blow, and comparisons, prides and despairs settle on my doorstep like tumbleweeds.  Layer upon tangled layer of self, self, self.  And if you know tumbleweeds like I do, you know that everywhere they rest, they scatter seeds that could survive a nuclear bomb.  Seeds of pride, seeds of self-doubt, ready to sprout up next time a triumphant or challenging circumstance comes along and choke out the truth again.
     Because I want to be someone who can 'handle' a lot of stress, I take on more, striving to earn God's respect.  Or I inwardly scoff at people who have fewer children or seemingly smaller problems. Or inwardly despair that I'm not capable of 'handling' as much as super working mom who makes all her own baby food and has her kids potty trained by age 2.75 because she read the perfect method in that book she read while I was rereading Divergent.

Webster, You Fool
      Honestly, what does 'handling' it really mean?  When I cried on my drive home from my teaching job every day in October two years ago, was I handling it?  When I lose my temper and let all kinds of horrible things come out of my mouth and into the ears and hearts of the people I love most, am I handling it?  When a loved one dies and we scream at the walls and throw things, are we handling it?  When you shut out the world because you cannot stand to answer another sympathetic phone call and say all the same things over and over again, are you handling it?  Does 'handling it' just mean you don't die from it?

    And the Bible is chock full of people who just couldn't handle it. And they knew it!  Moses whined around for an entire chapter about how he couldn't handle it, and that was right after he spoke directly with God through a bush that was aflame with the presence of God.  Gideon tested God multiple times to make sure God was going to handle the Midianites because he knew he sure couldn't.  David repeatedly sang out in the Psalms after countless battles - it's YOU, not me that did this. You deliver me! You fight for me! You draw me out of the pit!  Grab your Bible, close your eyes and open it and point your finger at it, and you will probably find a person who God called into circumstances where they were absolutely powerless without Him.  God never gives us more than we can handle?!  QUITE THE OPPOSITE!! God will repeatedly allow circumstances that we are unequipped to handle alone, because He wants to reveal Himself to us as a God we can cling to, and who is faithful to deliver us every single time. Yet we cling to the untruth that we should be able to handle the hand he dealt us, and if we are failing, it's our fault and we are failures.

     I hate this untruth the very most because I have witnessed people very dear to me go through things that they just cannot handle.  Cancer kills, steals and destroys moments like father-daughter dances, the birth of a grandchild, the ability to call your mom or dad when you need someone to talk to about your baby's digestive issues or a weird sound your car is making.  When parents and grandparents are robbed of their memories and identities. When disease wastes away bodies while loved ones drive frantically to and from appointments, scour the internet for information and ultimately stand helplessly by. When for no apparent reason, babies can't be carried to full term.  When a Mama of two is shattered, mind, body and life, in a senseless car accident.  It is too much to handle, manage, deal with without breaking.  How can they trust a God who allowed these circumstances? and how dare I, or anyone else, offer some platitude that suggests that their circumstances, and God's Sovereignty, and their capacity for stress are some kind of  balanced chemistry equation?

     I don't want to use the Bible like a bandaid, when I need it like oxygen; choosing one little strip out of a box and peeling off the context so I can stick it over an issue in my life and go on my merry way.

    The real truth?  I do my life every day pressing my face, no, plunging my whole head! into the character of God. And on days when I don't, I'm gasping for air.  The only answers and truth I can get about the way the world works, and my true identity, are to wholly lose myself in WHO HE IS.  He Is the God who carries my burdens.  He Is the God who satisfies me in the morning with His unfailing love.  He is the equipper and supplier of all my needs for all my roles.  He Is the advocate who goes before the Father with my wails and with my sin, and says - I've got her; this one is mine.  The One who has whispered truth to me over and over in the strangest of places, but mostly in the pages of His word.
     He is not a respecter of persons or achievements, but a lover and redeemer of souls. He is a God who loves to show me His strength, and His joy in carrying me along, burdens and all.  He is a God who not only is strong, but has begun to show me that my weaknesses and my hurts and my failures are nothing to be ashamed of, but precious tethers from my heart to His.  The dependence-strings that draw us close.  The wounds that keep me seeking a healer brings me to the healer.  The hunger  and thirst that keeps me seeking what this world cannot satisfy brings me to the living water.  The anxiety, complications and grief that bring my knees and forehead to the carpet to beg him for help and direction bring me to the one who is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.

    And so.  the nitty gritty truth - I cannot handle my life.  It's too good. Too big. Too sad. Too scary most of the time. There is too much at stake if I fail, and too much good to lose should anything go wrong.  And so I take a hands off approach.  A surrender approach. And let Him, the Sovereign master weaver of all things for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28) - He's the one I want to handle it.
STOP saying it.  Don't say it ever again.  God will often give us more than we can handle, just so we'll take our hands off and get out of His way.  Just ask Gideon. Or Moses.  Or David. He does it, and He does it on purpose and with purpose:  so there can be no other explanation for our deliverance than Him.  Don't deny Him this joy by taking too much on yourself in the name of being a good Christian. Let's be free of it from now on.

Lord Jesus, Light a fire in me.