You can only do so much.
It is a phrase I’ve been saying to others recently and one many have been reciting to me.
You can only do so much.
In modern life, we carry a full load—instead of three or four categories in life, it’s fifteen or sixteen. Under normal circumstances, when one slice of our pie grows, we feel the pinch. Stress, not enough time, sloppy work.
With so many slices, however, all it takes is for a few of them to grow at the same time and everything blows up.
A few crisis moments in a few different areas and the stress, time crunch and possibility of failure grows exponentially.
It’s true for college kids and newlyweds.
It’s true of moms and true of dads.
It’s true in the home or in the workplace.
We’re all learning how to manage a different kind of load than we grew up handling.
I had lunch at a Thai restaurant recently with a man in our church where we discussed the overextended nature of life, lamented over it and offered encouragement to each other.
The fear is, that with the pace and challenges of life, we won’t get to be the kind of friends, or husbands, or dads, or community members and citizens we want to be.
Everything is connected. If I fail at business, it affects family. If I fail at family, it makes business success pointless and empty.
If we don’t have margin to absorb the crisis moments then we need something else.
If the priorities in our life feel, at times, mutually exclusive and that we simply can’t win, there has to be something else to reach for to make sense of things.
Biblically, I believe this is hope and assurance from God.
God, if he wants anything for us, wants us to hope.
Even in the Old Testament, it seems that God can’t judge the unrighteous without a chapter or so later passionately explaining his plans to cut off discipline as soon as possible, restore them, and judge those who laughed or exploited their misfortune.
God is a father.
God is our Creator.
God is love.
God is the one who intended reality to look a certain way. He planned it, made it and shaped it. God declared that creation was good—it reflected his intentions, his beauty and his glory.
God, who once looked at man alone in the garden and said, “It is not good for man to be alone,” is surely a God who would look at people with the weight of the world on their shoulders and say, “It is not good for people to be crushed.”
Jesus reacted to the religious leaders because they weighed people down with the tyranny of laws, rules and religious regulations. He would certainly feel the same way about modernity and the information age if it is tyrannical and puts demands on us beyond what we can carry.
Whatever stress is compounding the weight in your life, the call of Jesus is to find him, and therefore peace and rest as a result.
You can only do so much.
“Cast your burden upon the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never allow the righteous to be shaken.” Psalm 55:22
