Overwhelm or Abundance?
“I come to You weak and weary—on the verge of feeling overwhelmed. It’s comforting to know that You are perfectly aware of the depth and breadth of my difficulties. Nothing is hidden from You.”
– Jesus Listens, March 25th
Anyone else struggling to stuff the demands of the day into the twenty-four measly hours we’re given, or is it just me?
The busyness of the last year of my life has bordered on ludicrous, even for someone like me whose self-satisfaction is directly linked to the fullness of my schedule. But it’s time to admit that I have officially reached capacity.
The fever pitch began rising late last summer when my family moved houses during a weekend between the disability summer camp sessions we host every year in a remote corner of Alabama. (I think I once read that moving houses is a top-five stressor in life. And even if I just made that up, I’ve decided it’s still factual.)
After returning home from camp, my sons immediately began a brand new school complete with all the lovely academic-catch-up, class-bully, cafeteria-cliques accouterment. The non-profit I lead launched a new weekend retreat right as I finished the editing process on a book manuscript. Just a couple of months later, that book was published on the very same day my team unveiled Mend, a years-in-the-making universally accessible coffee shop that employs adults with disabilities in Atlanta. As the coffee shop opened its doors, it was already time to begin preparations for this summer’s camp sessions.
I was experiencing something between déjà vu and drowning.
Between it all, I traveled to about two dozen cities around the country as part of my professional speaking career. Oh, and I forgot to mention, I did all this with significant physical disabilities, unable to drive myself or fly solo.
Life is filled to the brim with deeply good and deeply hard things. Busy doesn’t do it justice, y’all. I am utterly overwhelmed.
If I had to guess, I imagine you might be experiencing some overwhelm of your own. Your season of overload might not look exactly like mine, but I bet that gap between your responsibilities and your capacity is making your blood pressure rise.
Admittedly, I was in full-blown pity party mode as we pulled up to Mend for the grand opening a couple of weeks ago. I knew I should be excited for the day, but my enthusiasm was suffocated by the stress of all my other professional and parental duties. I posted up in my wheelchair at the front doors to welcome old friends and new customers and plastered a smile on my face. All the while, I was running through my mental to-do list and silently panicking about all that needed to be done.
Because the shop is designed to serve and employ people with disabilities, I had the chance to come face to face with so many hurting people on that opening day. Stroke survivors, people with visual impairments, friends with cerebral palsy, customers on the autism spectrum, and employees with degenerative neurological disorders, all moving around Mend.
I didn’t have to sit in that sacred space for very long before my soul’s posture radically shifted. Almost everyone around me was facing some type of overwhelm. Very few people in the shop had the bandwidth to manufacture problems or major on the minor.
Sixteen years ago as I lay in an ICU bed after suffering an all but unsurvivable stroke, I would have given absolutely anything to be overwhelmed by work opportunities and busy kids and moving homes. There was a time when my world was the size of a hospital bed and my only responsibility was learning to breathe on my own again. There were years when I wouldn’t have dared to dream life would be full again. Certainly not to the point of overflowing.
But slowly, almost imperceptibly, the emptiness of my life was occupied by a tentative hope that Jesus might have more for me. And then that hope expanded into opportunities. And those opportunities became overwhelm. As I surveyed the coffee shop on that grand opening day, that overwhelm began to feel more like abundance.
Dear one, perhaps you’re finally leaving behind a season of stress. Or maybe you’re just now entering into some fresh bout of chaos. You might be smack in the middle of the certifiably worst days of your life. Wherever you are, I beg you to ask God to place you among people who can give you perspective on your present circumstances. Maybe you need to be reminded of just how far you’ve come. Or maybe you need some borrowed hope that better days are ahead, days when you might be overwhelmed by plans and possibilities rather than pain.
Let’s agree to give ourselves grace for our limited capacities and blessed humanity and the all-too-real stress that comes with this whole “being alive” deal. But let’s also agree to redefine the good-but-hard overwhelm of our lives as an abundance of opportunities.
About The Author
Katherine Wolf is a survivor and advocate who leverages her redemptive story to encourage those with broken bodies, broken brains, and broken hearts. She and her husband, Jay, have co-authored two books, Hope Heals and Suffer Strong. In 2017, they founded Hope Heals Camp, an intergenerational retreat experience for families with disabilities. In 2023, realizing that the very thing that broke them would also MEND them into stronger, more resilient people, they opened Mend Coffee & Goods, a community hub offering dignifying employment to adults with disabilities in a beautiful, universally designed space for customers of all abilities. Katherine and Jay live in Atlanta with their two sons. Treasures in the Dark: 90 Reflections on Finding Bright Hope Hidden in the Hurting is available everywhere books are sold. Learn more at hopeheals.com.
