Overwhelmed

God, I Look to You/Hallelujah Even Here, Lydia Laird

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR5IoWH9OiI Jenn Johnson

Overwhelmed, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6oxXwRWFTo Big Daddy Weave

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Romans 12:21

There’s no question that circumstances in my life were leaving me feeling overwhelmed. Happy, feel-good dreams I’d repeatedly had of moving to a new house or owning a dog were being replaced by dreams of a car accident, being overtaken by a hurricane, and being covered up by an avalanche.

Slightly alarming.

Additionally, I had succumbed to the pressures of the current whirlwind and (out of convenience and sometimes necessity) eaten foods which manifest in my body with inflammatory pain; if not curbed by self-control and proper eating habits, this would continue to spread like gangrene throughout my body. The anxieties of the move took its toll in the form of incessant stomach aches, and I had been living among boxes and packing, purging, and repeating. I was definitely ready to transition to the unpacking process.

Truth be told, the whole process from start to finish went extremely quickly:  just over five weeks from the day we looked at the house, we started moving in. Where the sad-happy feelings I was experiencing were surely normal, they were exhausting. At the same time that negotiations for the new home were taking place, we were at long last cleaning up from a reconstruction project that had spanned months. The labor of midnight mop-ups in our basement from Wisconsin rains had left us with no alternative than to dig into the foundation and seal up the cracks from the outside. 

Also at the same time, I had been seeking closure concerning some emotional exhaustion due to an unexpected closed door on an international adoption we had been pursuing.  

Yet God promises that “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned (Is.43:2). 

When faced with insurmountable pressures of daily life or media hype, we do not need to be paralyzed with a fear that threatens to overwhelm us. When we feel the floods of our circumstances eddying about us, we can hold on to His promise that He will be with us. It is tempting to ignore issues that He wants to root out, but that comes with its own maintenance program, just as our own maintenance required us to mop up water each time it rained, until we took time to fix the root issue. Yes, it takes investment of time and resources to explore the source of the floods, physical as well as emotional. In the case of our basement, when we finally hired a back-hoe digger to pull away the soil, we were able to easily see the source of the problem:  one end of the basement had not been poured concrete but stonework in need of repointing, or filling in the cracks.  In the case of our spiritual growth, the end result is that the Lord wants to build new things into our lives, and sometimes that requires digging out the old foundations and letting Him rebuild us with His firm truths that won’t flood us out.

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Romans 12:21