There’s a self-soothing saying I’ve heard for most of my life:
“God will never give you more than you can handle.”
It’s a bit of psychological gamesmanship, a way of shoring up our courage when we are facing a difficult season – I can do this! If God allowed it, I must be able handle it!
It’s just that in practice, I’ve found this little maxim to be patently false.
God loves to give me more than I can handle. In fact, I believe that one of the ways God loves me is to throw me headlong into way more than I can handle.
I was created to live in ongoing connection and dependency on my Creator, but my sin-nature rebels against that designed posture of need. I want to be the hero of my own story and the author of my own narrative. And so I regularly find myself blindly wandering out on my own, seeking to live, create, and work beyond the scope of my God-dependent design.
So if finding myself in over my skis ultimately drives me back to Him, God will gladly give me far more than I can handle…because He loves me.
What are you dealing with in your life and your work today that feels too heavy for you to bear? You and I were made to live in daily dependence on God, and anything He does to nudge us back there is His grace at work in our lives.
Accelerating the Great Commission through the Marketplace,
Erik Cooper | The Stone Table
