I have seen a lot of posts on Facebook lately about that
fateful expression “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” I hate that phrase. I hate it with all that’s in my soul.
I believed it for years.
I was diagnosed with a chronic, painful medical condition at age
19. I spent years convincing myself that
God must really have some serious faith in how much I could handle and I used
that phrase to empower myself.
Then, I got married…young.
“Marriage is hard!” people tried to tell me. I remember thinking to myself “Well YOUR
husband must just be a jerk. My husband
is perfect!” Guess what?!! MARRIAGE IS HARD! We were both going through graduate school,
living paycheck to paycheck trying to work and go to school full time. This is when I began to suspect that, if God
really does only give you what you can handle, then there must be a
miscommunication somewhere. He must have
me confused with someone else.
The next phase of my life is when I became convinced that
not only WILL God give you more than you
can handle, and he will give you sooooo much more that it forces you to rely on
Him, (or start drinking heavily!). We
started out on the journey of adoption.
At first it was all rainbows and butterflies. Sure, the paperwork was endless, people didn’t
quite understand why we were taking this path, we didn’t quite receive the
overwhelming joyful reaction we had hoped for from those closest to us and
there were tears. All in all though, it
was good. Stressful, but good.
Once we got the call about the twins though, the bottom
dropped out. We took over the disrupted
adoption of twin 4 year olds who didn’t speak any English, were in diapers, had
only been in the country for 6 weeks and didn’t know us from Adam. They were terrified, traumatized, and behaved
like wild animals…no exaggeration.
The first night, once they finally went to sleep, I remember
turning to Mike and asking him “Can we really do this? What have we gotten ourselves into?” I am sure a lot of first time parents can
relate to that feeling, especially those of multiples.
That first year consisted of hardly leaving the house. There were tantrums and rages that lasted
hours. We became very familiar with the
art of physical restraint, in fact that became our method of bonding because it
was happening every day. The worst part
about it was that we couldn’t really get to the core of why they were so angry,
because of the language barrier.
If you know our adoption story, then you understand how we
knew that God had these children planned for us. The confusing part was HOW IN THE WORLD DID
HE THINK WE COULD DO THIS?? Yes, I have
my degrees in early childhood education and developmental psychology, but no
class can prepare you for this. This was
beyond. Every book we read (and we read
a lot of them) said we were doing everything right. You may think this would be comforting for
us, but instead it was infuriating. If
we were doing everything right, then why were they acting like this?
The independent, control freak in me waived the white
flag. I had to surrender. I had to admit I couldn’t do this alone. If God gave me these girls, then He was going
to have to help me through this, but that meant me letting Him. That meant me leaning on Him, praying,
reading His word and living it through my life.
I had to stop caring or listening to what everyone else was telling me
to do and listen to Him.
Guess what? It worked! :) Slowly, my anxiety waned, the girls began
trusting us, and our marriage was actually strengthened through this very tough
time. I began to see God working in our
lives in incredible ways. I learned to
trust Him and His timing in my life. It
took time, and it’s still a work in progress.
If you are in a place in your life where you don’t
understand why, why would God do this to you?
Know this: He will use this to draw you closer to Him, you just have to
let Him. Throw up your hands, throw in
the white flag and surrender. You can’t
do it alone.
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