Life can be full of overwhelm and stress, but we don't have to stay negatively overwhelmed by our circumstances. Today I'm sharing Why We Should be Overwhelmed by God and Not Our Circumstances.
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If I’m honest, this entire school year has been far more chaotic and overwhelming than Taylor and I anticipated. In the Fall, I bit off a little more than I could chew with my schedule. In the winter we had some overwhelming and scary medical stuff happen in my family and Taylor and I bought a house. After buying a house things settled down a little bit and I've felt less overwhelmed, but there's still been a lot going on and sometimes that's just life. Honestly, at least 50% of the things that have been overwhelming have also been good things - things that we love, enjoy, and benefit from. Overwhelm doesn't just come when things are going wrong. And sometimes overwhelm can hit us when we aren't expecting it.
I should note before we continue on that sometimes overwhelm is avoidable. Sometimes we pack our schedules far too full and we say yes to things that we should pass up on. Sometimes our feelings of stress and overwhelm are self-inflicted. In these cases, it's important to recognize this and make changes. Busyness is not a badge of honor and it is unwise to stretch ourselves so thin that we can barely function. Though that's not the point of this post, it's worth noting. Now let's move on 😉
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Related Post: How to Focus on God (and Not the World)
We Don't Have to Stay Overwhelmed
I wrote about this on Instagram a while back, but as I've thought about overwhelm this year, I've been struck by something important to remember: We don’t have to sit in these feelings. We can recognize that the negative overwhelm is there without steeping ourselves in it and letting it consume us. If we choose to surrender our overwhelm to the Lord, and if we trust in his good and perfect plan for our lives, and if we are living in obedience to him, then we don’t have to be taken captive by those feelings. We can surrender them, knowing that God will sustain us and carry us through.
Why should surrendering our overwhelm to the Lord comfort us?
- Because we know that whatever he allows in our lives is for our good (Romans 8:28)
- Because we know that Jesus can sympathize with us in our weakness (Hebrews 4:15)
- Because we know that his peace surpasses any of our worries (Philippians 4:7)
- Because we know that he will finish the work he started in us (Philippians 1:6)
A Good Kind of Overwhelm
But that wasn’t the end of the thought. What also occurred to me is that we should be consumed by the overwhelming love of God. We should be overwhelmed by his goodness, his holiness, his mercy, and all of who he is. This is the overwhelm that should rule our lives, and this type of overwhelm is good and right and pure.
We have a beautifully overwhelming God, and yet we often let ourselves be overwhelmed by earthly matters instead. It’s not that those things don’t matter at all, of course. We live in the world and there are many hard and heavy things to deal with, mourn, and work through. But all of those things can be surrendered to God, and we can choose to be overwhelmed by his goodness and sovereignty when nothing else makes sense.
As you look at your own heart today, are you consumed with the overwhelm of life, or are you consumed by the goodness of God? Comment below.
Helpful Resources
- Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem (Kevin DeYoung)
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