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What To Do When Life Feels Out of Control

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3 Steps When You are Overwhelmed

Life happens. What do you do when it’s not what you were expecting? If God is loving, how come He allows (seemingly) random tradgedies in our lives? When we are in serious pain, it is easy to push a (seemingly) passive God further away. Sometimes it even feels God is aggressively destroying us. How does God stand idlely by? Should our goal be to rid ourselves of pain? What other thing do you instinctually grab for even when the “right answer” is before you? These questions can be summarized down to one other question. Who (or what) do you really trust in? We know the Bible says God is trustworthy. Often God doesn’t feel trustworthy. What can you do when you feel overwhelmed?

Endure Hardship

Endure. Be still. Refocus. We can accept hardship as discipline. Can we? Does it work? What happens when we are already not trusting God, and something (else) terrible happens? God has “rejected us”, so we want to reject Him! Maybe that is good. Because, the God we are angry at is not the true God. We should reject the false God and look to the true God. We can accept hardship in our lives. The trick is to see it in the right light. Most of the time we see hardship as negative – an indication that God has removed His love from us. But Hebrews 12:5-11 turns this around. Hardship proves we are legitimately God’s child.

Fear or Faith

When we are overwhelmed, it leaves the door open for fear. In the midst of feeling overwhelmed, check in with yourself. How high is your fear level? Are you a conduit of fear or faith? Fear has a way of disrupting life and making matters much worse than they are (pretty much true of any kind of darkness). The Bible says perfect love casts out fear. Each day, find some way to open the door to God’s love.

Cast your Anxiety

We can open ourselves by casting our anxiety on God. God knows we suffer, because He suffered too. There is no better way to suffer than to suffer in the presence of God. With our faith, we trust again that God will hear. We pour out our feelings to God, so God can fill us with good things – perfect love. This is not an easy process. Grieving never is. But it is on the path to healing.

Reflections

  1. Is it easier to endure hardship when you know (you really feel) you are God’s child?
  2. When you are overwhelmed, pay attention to how much you responding in fear or in faith. Are you surprised? How much is pure fear?
  3. How do you feel about pouring out your anxiety in faith?
  4. Jesus, help us turn to you when our circumstances do not make sense. Teach us to trust. Amen.

Resources

Hebrews 12:5-11

… Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. …

Read on Bible Gateway

1 John 4:18

18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

Read on Bible Gateway

1 Peter 5:6-11

… Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. … And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.

Read on Bible Gateway

Be Spiritually Competent

Be Spiritually Competent

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Being spiritually competent probably means many different things to different people. I take it to mean a combination of discerning the truth and living out the truth so that you become emotionally healthy. The spiritually competent Christian knows how to interpret the Bible and actively pursues spiritual growth.

Carl Jung, a psychologist, said, “To be fully aware and embracing of all that is within us and consciously seeking to be all that we can be is our most noble quest.” To be that aware is only possible with God’s divine help. If we want to know ourselves better, we must also know God better. When we know God better, we will also know ourselves better.

Each moment in life presents an opportunity to either improve your competence or to remain indifferent. Your choice won’t change your worth before God, however, how you experience life will be vastly different.

Jung had another well-known phrase, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” It is profound but it is also somewhat cryptic. It’s worth a deeper look. Put another way, Jung is saying you can either suffer legitimately or suffer neurosis.

The Spiritually Competent Avoid Suffering Needlessly

The greatest way to suffer needlessly is at your own hand. So often we inflict unnecessary punishment upon ourselves as a penance. Life has enough consequences built in without you adding your own.

Christ has already paid for your past, present, and future sins. What happens if you don’t fully grasp this core truth of the gospel? You probably develop some sort of neurosis.

C. George Boeree thought of neurosis as a “poor ability to adapt to one’s environment, an inability to change one’s life patterns” with symptoms such as “anxiety, sadness or depression, anger, irritability, low sense of self-worth, phobic avoidance, impulsive and compulsive acts, lethargy, unpleasant or disturbing thoughts, repetition of thoughts and obsession, habitual fantasizing, negativity and cynicism, [unhealthy] dependency, aggressiveness, perfectionism…” (1)

Is it possible that these symptoms show up as a result of avoiding the hard work of spiritual growth? I’m not suggesting it’s wrong to feel anxious or depressed but I am suggesting that it’s certainly possible to reduce and even eliminate them.

Jung was an early advocate for character development in its most pure sense. He knew that we can only really be happy, fulfilled, and socially productive when we have not only come to know but also come to terms with our biggest challenge: ourselves.

Dr George Simon, Phd (2)

The Spiritually Competent Suffer As God Wills

Hebrews 10:32-39 and 1 Peter 3:13-17 provide a biblical perspective on legitimate suffering. It’s better to suffer while doing good than doing evil. Sometimes no matter what you do, you’re going to suffer. So it might as well be for the noblest reasons.

To suffer legitimately means you accept life as it is. You don’t need to escape from the fact that all living beings experience some suffering. The criminals on their crosses illustrate this idea:

One of the criminals hanging on the cross next to Jesus kept ridiculing him, saying, “What kind of Messiah are you? Save yourself and save us from this death!” The criminal hanging on the other cross rebuked the man, saying, “Don’t you fear God? You’re about to die! We deserve to be condemned. We’re just being repaid for what we’ve done. But this man—he’s done nothing wrong!” Then he said, “I beg of you, Jesus, show me grace and take me with you into your everlasting kingdom!” Jesus responded, “I promise you—this very day you will enter paradise with me.”

Luke 23:39-43 TPT

The first criminal was trying to weasel his way out of the punishment as if he didn’t deserve it. The second criminal accepted the punishment but appealed to God’s grace. The avoidance of developing character leads away from legitimate suffering and toward distressing symptoms. The worst kind of suffering is suffering for no good reason.

If you try to cheat life by hoping someone will ignore your sins and give you a free pass, your circumstances will likely overtake you. This requires no effort on your part, but you can end up suffering more this way than the way of character development.

If you choose growth you will become more resilient and better able to meet life’s demands. This way requires you to choose humility by owning your sins and relying on God’s grace. Accepting responsibility for what you’ve done doesn’t usually remove consequences. You might still suffer, but your suffering will bear fruit, and being spiritually competent will ease your pain. Isn’t the attitude of the second criminal much better than the first?

Read more about suffering needlessly.
(1) modified from what I found on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurosis
(2) Additional thoughts on Carl Jung can be found at https://counsellingresource.com/features/2010/08/03/jung-words-of-wisdom
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Worry Less Trust More

Worry Less Trust More

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Worry and anxiety are pretty much the same. Spiritually speaking, they both are rooted in fear which is essentially an inability to trust God no matter what.

Life brings many situations that challenge our ability to trust God. What can you do to worry less and trust more?

Worry Less By Focusing On The Present Moment

When you worry, you are looking too far ahead into the future. All of us would like to know the future. But it can interfere with your faith. If you could only have one or the other, God would always prefer you maintain your faith (your trust) in Him instead of knowing anything about the future.

How far into the future is too far to be looking? For some people or in some situations looking 100 years might be too far. But others can stir up anxiety even by looking 100 seconds. Where you focus is more important than how far ahead you look. If you try to find security somewhere out into the future, you will never find it because you will miss that God is with you in the present.

If you want to worry less, then reduce how far you are looking ahead until you reclaim a sense of peace. Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow (the future). Each day (the present) has enough to occupy you. If even the events of later in the day concern you, focus on the present moment. At this very second, there’s not a whole lot to be concerned about. Take one day (one moment, one second) at a time.

Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Matthew 6:27,34 NIV

If you find yourself saying, “yes, but…” about something that’s going to be happening or needs to happen, then you’ve already shifted your focus away from the present and onto a future moment. If you want to experience peace instead of stress, stop and recenter yourself back to the present.

Worry Less By Surrendering All Outcomes to God

You might be having an awesome day and find it easy to trust God. You might be having a horrible day, month, or year but God would have you trust Him the same. Nothing should come between you and God. Bad luck? Nope. Evil? Nope. Disease? Nope. Your health? Nope. Your very life? Nope. See Romans 8:31-39 for more on this.

It’s easy to value your life more than God. If you suffer a serious illness, your very existence is threatened. Or is it? It really depends upon your perspective. As a believer, you’re going to live forever. Do you allow God to determine how long you will live in this life? Or are you wringing your hands trying to figure out how to squeeze another hour out of it?

It’s easy to care about what happens in this life because it’s all we know. Or is it? As a believer, you have the Holy Spirit. So you have a taste of heaven today. Right now you can sense the goodness of heavenly living.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:6-7 NIV

Do what is reasonable for each day to move your life forward. Leave the rest up to God (by praying and letting it go). If you find yourself panicking because of one thing or another, stop trying to be God: reduce what is on your plate. You weren’t meant to save the world. God sent Jesus for that!

Read more about trusting God.
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Act With Authority As You Live By The Spirit

Act With Authority As You Live By The Spirit

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Authority implies both confidence and the power to back it up. How often do you feel confident enough to act with God’s power? If you’re like me, you can never have too many reminders that God is on your side empowering you accomplish His will.

God wants us to act with authority when we are in alignment with His desires.

Act With Authority: Prioritize God’s Kingdom

If God wants something to happen, He can supply all you need to accomplish it. God knows what is most important in life. It’s those most important tasks that will ultimately bring the most joy by fulfilling them.

Sometimes, it’s hard to see what tasks are kingdom-focused. There are so many distractions and possibilities for how to live. The verse below starts with “seek.” Other words for seek are: pursue, explore, investigate, follow. That would imply that out understanding of God’s kingdom isn’t complete.

God also wants us to pursue what is right and reasonable. Believers have the mind of Christ, so we have some idea of what to pursue. Walking in the Spirit and being connect with God’s mind provides all we need to act with authority.

Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

Matthew 6:33 NLT

Act With Authority: Don’t Worry

If you want something more than God thinks you need it, then you’ll end up carrying the burden for claiming it.

If you and Jesus are yoked together pulling a great weight, the effort required will be burdensome or manageable depending upon who is more eager to pull the weight.

If you are in a place of submission by letting Jesus lead, He will do most of the heavy lifting. But if in your impatience, you want to move faster than Jesus, you will feel the strain on your shoulders.

Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”

Matthew 11:28-30 NLT

Act With Authority: Work Hard

Allowing God to lead doesn’t mean there is nothing left for you to do. God wants us to labor with all we have.

God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. Do you have the gift of speaking? Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you. Do you have the gift of helping others? Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies. Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ. All glory and power to him forever and ever! Amen.

Ephesians 4:10-11 NLT

Therefore, we should develop a sophisticated believe system that allows for a complex application of God’s truth. We can both be dependent upon God’s strength and fully exercise our own strength. Both require faith because our strength can’t compare to God’s. But God wants us to participate with Him in the pursuit of His kingdom.

As you go about your days ahead, exercise your faith by seeking God’s kingdom. Put into practice all that you’ve learned from the Bible, the Spirt, and other believers. While you do this, be aware of God’s strength working in your life.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead

Ephesians 1:18-20 NIV

Grow Your Desire To Advance God’s Kingdom
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Man desiring to be powerful, looking to God for help.

Be Powerful Without Being Self-absorbed

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The quickest way to be powerful is to develop healthy doses of humility and confidence. If you lean too far in one direction then life becomes unbalanced and can lead to a world of hurt and trouble. But, healthy humility and confidence result in joy.

How does joy related to power? To answer this, I first want you to consider the following four possible combinations of humility and confidence:

  • Self-loathing: a false humility without much if any confidence means harmfully low self-worth. This person actively rejects the truth about who God is and who He made them to be.
  • Self-deprecating: a helpful amount of humility without enough confidence leads to questionable self-worth. This person is healthy when they have a lighthearted ability to laugh at their mistakes. However, their negative self-expression can also come from a poisoned self-image.
  • Self-confident: a helpful dose of humility and confidence means self-care without arrogance. This person lets God be God while also feeling good about who they are.
  • Self-absorbed: too little humility with too much confidence results in an inflated sense of importance. This person becomes overcompensates for their low self-worth by focusing too much on trying to feel powerful. Increasing focus on self becomes a dead-end at self-loathing. An unhealthy preoccupation with self misses out on what God has to offer.

People become self-absorbed when they look only within themselves to heal their brokenness. In futility, people try to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But, the power that originates anywhere except from God promises only the illusion of confidence.

For example, if self becomes everything and God is minimized, then God isn’t in His rightful position in our lives. We’re not really going to succeed – maybe we’ll succeed with financially or something – but overall for God’s kingdom and his purposes we won’t be succeeding.

Be Humble So You Can Be Powerful

The world says you must be strong and independent to be powerful. But an “I can do it all by myself” attitude fails to activate God’s power.

Do you want to be full of your own power or full of God's power? You can be humble, confident, and full of God's power. Why settle for only what you can muster without God? Share on X

God says to be powerful, you must be weak enough to accept His help. A healthy weakness is a vulnerable dependence. Depending upon God activates His power.

Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.

2 Corinthians 12:9 NLT

Be Confident So You Can Be Powerful

If you focus too much on God, if that’s possible, and minimize yourself then you can develop self-loathing where you don’t feel like you’re much of anything. Self-loathing is simply another form of arrogance that blocks God out of your life.

God’s power isn’t going to shine through you then. You need to have a right view of yourself so that God’s power will rest on you and work through you.

Be Joyful So You Can Be Powerful

The joy of the Lord is your strength (Nehemiah 8:10). How can you experience joy if you carry the heavy load of bitterness toward your own spirit?

Passively waiting for God to make you powerful doesn’t work. To be full of power, you must actively allow God to fill you, which also means keeping yourself empty of substitute fillings. Being filled with the Spirit means having great joy in God.

So be very careful how you live, not being like those with no understanding, but live honorably with true wisdom, for we are living in evil times. Take full advantage of every day as you spend your life for his purposes. And don’t live foolishly for then you will have discernment to fully understand God’s will. And don’t get drunk with wine, which is rebellion; instead be filled with the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Ephesians 5:15-18 TPT

How Can We Be Powerful And Not Self-absorbed? How Can We Be Confident While Also Humble?

If we want to be powerful, we must be joyful. If we want to be joyful, we can’t live rebelliously independent from God. We must stop living with the habits of self-deprecation and self-absorption. The antidote for poisoning shame is to look to God for help.

Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces.

Psalm 34:5 NLT

So we should go for everything. We should do all that we can – shoot from the moon so to speak – but also keep that in check by accepting whatever God provides or doesn’t provide in our lives.

He may have a different plan than the one on our minds, and it may take some time to figure out what that is, but it doesn’t mean we should just be sidelined and sitting back and waiting for something to happen either.

We should take the truths in the Bible that God has given us and run with them as best as we can. But ultimately it is up to God to author our success.

The inspiration for this post came from a conversation I had with Kidron Tirey.

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Brokenness Is Beautiful

Brokenness Is Beautiful

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When you can see your brokenness, you see yourself as you really are. It’s a wonderful moment of freedom from pretense. Seeing brokenness is simply another way to perceive what you are lacking.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

Psalm 34:18 NIV

Since God is the ultimate source of all we lack, we should welcome becoming aware of our brokenness. Why is it often so terrifying then? Believe it or not, it’s possible to fear something good. We crave consistency. After we start depending on something or someone, we don’t want it to go away.

If we lack something good we can fear both:

  • that we’ll never receive what we need.
  • that what we receive will inevitably be taken away.

Both fears are realistic, yet, painful. Both are ultimately rooted in doubting God is who He says He is. God gives good things to those who believe and ask.

And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

Hebrews 11:6; Matthew 7:11 NIV

Fear Makes Brokenness Ugly

So you can see how when fear is present, needs and desires can become completely overwhelming. If you’ve lived with deprivation for a long time, you know what I mean.

If your needs go unmet, you lose touch with what it’s like to have them met. Often this means living with an awareness that you don’t know what it is like to have them met. The longer this continues, the more difficult it is to trust it will ever be different. And, if it does happen, it will be doubly painful to lose it.

Anyone who experiences the trauma of abuse or neglect usually lives with a sense of deprivation. Abuse and neglect break trust which is essential if you want to risk the vulnerability required to have your needs met. Deprivation can be so painful that it is often more intense than the original trauma.

Coping Forever Prevents Healing

Depriving yourself for any length of time usually requires numbing your desires. If you can’t feel your hunger (emotional needs), it’s nearly impossible to over-eat (be self-centered). Unfortunately though, it is possible to under-eat (be deprived).

Cutting off your cravings for love and acceptance is a coping mechanism called dissociation. I believe dissociation to be a necessary coping to manage intense trauma. However, all coping is meant to be temporary until genuine healing and transformation are available and the person is ready.

How much a person relies on coping depends on at least two factors:

  • The intensity of the pain experienced from trauma.
  • The availability of a safe-enough relationship that promotes healing.

The intensity of the pain is mostly subjective. Some people can tolerate more pain than others. But the more the event is severe enough and prolonged enough, and if the person doesn’t have access to a caring person, the more extreme coping is needed.

One of the most intense efforts to cope with trauma is dissociation. When it becomes a mental health disorder it’s called dissociative-identity-disorder (DID).

For a person with DID, their self-awareness becomes divided into multiple parts in order to survive trauma. Therapy involves integrating the parts so that all parts receive needed healing. The end result is a person with a sense of being one integrated person (no longer needing “multiple parts”).

Another word for dissociated is broken. Everyone is broken. On this side of heaven, the opposite of being broken is being in denial. Meaning: if I can’t see my brokenness, I must be denying it.

Embrace your brokenness because it is what will drive you to God. He can help you become free from the trauma and deprivation you’ve been through.

Push Through Fear And Find Hope
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