Overwhelmed

The duties, expec­ta­tions, and lim­i­ta­tions add up until one day you feel over­whelmed. You wake up in the morn­ing won­der­ing how you will get it all done. One day, you wake up and real­ize that there is no way you can ful­fill all of your oblig­a­tions. That is when the good news appears. You do not have to. Life is not about quo­tas. It is a process designed to mature your soul. The end result is qual­ity not quan­tity.

For a while, you work smarter instead of harder. You pick pri­or­i­ties a lit­tle bet­ter. That will get you through a decade, dur­ing your peak pro­duc­tive years any­way, but it will not solve the cen­tral issue: one day you will be totally over­whelmed with your own health prob­lems — plus all of the bills. Jesus com­pared the end game of life to a flood (and dur­ing peri­ods of social upheaval it comes long before old age). If you built a life on solid prin­ci­ples, it will be like hav­ing a house with a rock-solid foun­da­tion. If you built your life on shal­low expe­ri­ences and pop ideas, you will be blown away.

I like it when I come to the end of my rope. That is where faith enters. It is when I real­ize the dynam­ics of pure tran­scen­dence. Peo­ple race motor­cy­cles and sky­dive to taste this expe­ri­ence briefly. For every­day peo­ple with too much to do, it hap­pens much of the time. Life is always a bit out of con­trol. You can­not out-wrestle or out-maneuver it. The sooner you go from flesh to spirit the bet­ter. Holi­ness is supe­rior to hap­pi­ness. It is the rip­cord that works every sin­gle time.

When I am over­whelmed, I drop the ball on pur­pose. I start say­ing “no” to all sorts of good things. Self-care becomes the pri­or­ity. Let’s face it, there really is not much going on out there that actu­ally has to do with life or death. It is mostly just social noise, insti­tu­tional demands, and per­sonal inse­cu­ri­ties. Jesus did not heal every­one. He did not teach every­one. He lived but a sin­gle life experience…and died young. He did not ful­fill everyone’s expec­ta­tions — far from it. He was seen as a major polit­i­cal dis­ap­point­ment. He “dropped the ball” and was exe­cuted.

Spirit does not work like the world. It is not depen­dent on imag­i­nary social com­pe­ten­cies nor pieces of paper hang­ing in nice-looking frames on the wall. Spirit walks away in peace. Blessed is the per­son whose inner world is more pow­er­ful than his or her outer one.