On Overwhelm

“Mama, are you overwhelmed?”

It was Justice who asked, looking up at me inquiringly, his little mouth carefully pronouncing the word he’d clearly heard before.

I smiled down at him, “No sweetie, I’m happy.”

And I was. But I knew why he was asking it. I had been overwhelmed. Way overwhelmed. And through over the course of a few weeks, the Lord was showing me how subtle this temptation of overwhelm really was.

Temptation? Overwhelm is not a temptation. Temptations are things like sex and second pieces of cake. Right?

Sometimes. But sometimes our temptations are so much more subtle than that.

It started on our drive up to Spokane. Leaving my family to go away and speak for a weekend is at lot of work. It’s a lot of work to prepare to speak, and it’s a lot of work to prepare my family with everything they need for me to be gone. But this time my family came with me and I discovered the only thing that’s more work than leaving them at home to go speak is bringing them with me to go speak. 😉 I quickly became grumpy and frustrated, and my thoughts, most-certainly not taken-captive, began to run amok something like this:

I’m never doing this again. It’s impossible, this is way too much work to do all of this, I just can’t do this anymore. I’ll let people know when we get back that I’m not going to be speaking anymore.

Ha. Of course even as my thoughts went there, I thought of the wise saying from a woman who has endured more hardship than I can imagine:

Don’t decide to give up running while going up a hill.

Of course.

Last week Dutch had a hard cross-country race. I was worried that he was injured, his form was odd and he didn’t have his usual grin. Gratefully, it was just a hard race. It was hot. It was smoky. He’d had a harder-than-usual training week and he was just plain tired.

But within a minute or two he had his breath, was feeling good, and back to his usual smiling self.

Turns out it was just one hard race. Turns out he’s only 4 weeks into running this much and he could really use more training. Of course.

Can you imagine if, at about 4K into that hot and smoky race he stopped and said, “You know, I don’t think cross-country is for me. This just isn’t my sport. Turns out it’s not as fun as I thought. I’ll go ahead and just let the coach know that I’m done for the season.”

Of course not.

Ok, so what does this have to do with overwhelm?

Overwhelm is the first step toward quitting. It’s a form of mental quitting. Instead of saying, “Wow this is harder than I thought. I’m going to need _______________ (stamina, new strategies, patience, more sleep, etc.). I wonder what steps I can take to be more prepared for this,” it’s telling yourself, “This is too hard, this is ridiculous, no one should have to do this.”

Now of course one caveat: It could be that you’re not called to do the thing. Dutch did piano and baseball as well in years past. He gave it a year or two, and it truly wasn’t his thing. Great. Move on.

But most of the time I’m overwhelmed by things I really am called to do, I just need more training.

Back to temptation.

It’s a temptation to let yourself take that mental step into quitting. It’s a cop-out. It’s a way to blame circumstances which completely robs us of our opportunities to grow.

If Dutch quit he’d never become a faster runner.

If I just quit speaking or homeschooling or whatever God is calling me to do, I’ll never walk in the good works God prepared for me in advance (Eph. 2:10).

I just sent Dutch off to practice with his two water bottles and peanut butter pretzels. He’s learning his rhythm, and I am too. I’m learning that I can’t plan things that take me away from the kids during the days we’re doing school. I’m learning that dinner-prep really needs to be done in the morning. I’m learning a nightly house-reset makes mornings so much better. I’m learning a 4pm snack for the littles goes a long way in keeping us all sane during that difficult pre-dinner window.

Instead of giving in to the temptation to overwhelm, instead of the mental throwing-up-of-the-hands and saying “This is too hard,” I’m trying a deep breath and asking, “What do I need in order to manage this better?”

Shall we try it together?