I’ve been thinking about this for a while – this concept that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle. It seems like I’ve been hearing it more, or maybe I’ve just been noticing it more. The end of every year is a reflective time for me. I started thinking about this last year of our lives, how so many storms came all at once, how so many times I was drowning and felt like everything was slipping out of my reach, and I came to this one conclusion:

I don’t think that God gives us more than we can handle, but he sure does allow it.

Let me break it down for you a bit. You see, by this point I’ve gotten a little past the long-standing belief in my life that God gives us hard and terrible things on purpose just to make us stronger.

I watch my boys and I feel my love for them. I realize that life is hard. Very hard. Bad things happen in life, they just do. I don’t cause those things to happen to my boys and I try to shield them from it at every corner. But eventually I need to just step back and watch them take the test and fail once in a while. And sometimes, letting them fall under more than they can handle brings them back to reality and their need for help, no matter how painful it is for us all to watch and experience.

I would definitely stand in front of you and tell you that God has, at times, allowed me to fall under more than I can handle. I don’t think or believe that he “gave” me those things – I think that God is loving and I believe what Paul tells James about God giving good gifts to his children. But as I look in my life, I see God allowing some storms in my life to push me past the point of my abilities.

I can almost see him watching it all happen. He didn’t step back and take a nap. No. He cried when I cried. And he hurt when I hurt. And he held my hand through each and every step. But he did not stop the bad things – at least not all of them. He knew I needed to get swept under by the current that was far too great for me to “handle” for me to emerge with an understanding of greater things than I’d ever dreamed of.

If it were left to me and my physical capabilities, I would not be sitting here writing to you today.

You see, it’s at the very point where our own strength and ability to handle things runs out where we find something that is hidden and greater, something at the bottom of the barrel, something locked away in a reservoir that we’ve never had to tap into before. And that, my dear, is the purpose beneath all the struggle.

The thing that bothers me most about people saying that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle is the belief that God wants us to be able to handle all the things in life – and the underlying assumption that it will all work out somehow. Some things don’t work out. Some things are just awful… But they can be awful chances to grow.

The moments my faith has been refined the most are not the times when I feel powerful and capable and strengthened whether on my own or even by God. No, it has been the times when I’ve been a sobbing crumpled mess on the floor with no way to go further down than I already was. It’s the times when I’ve been so aware of my humanity and my inability to hold life together and make the necessary decisions to bring stability and take the next breath. It’s the times when my optimism, grace, and bravery have all run out and I’m ready to give up…

These are the times when I unravel something greater. These are the moments when I come to grips with the fact that there’s so much more than just “handling” things. There is a beauty that comes when we’re underwater, with our hands open, where we release our grip and let the pieces just crumble and shatter and realize we don’t want or need to handle it anyway and we simply let go – those are the moments that bring us to a point of rawness and clarity that we’ve never known before.

Crisis has this way of shattering away all the of the excess pieces, the things we’ve been handling and managing and keeping together. And when those all crash and burn, we’re left with empty hands and open eyes. And the only thing in front of us in those moments are the eyes of grace, looking at us in all our nakedness and bruises and distraught cries that have run out of words. Those are the moments when we see what we’re actually made of and it looks completely different that what we’re used to. These are the times when we see that grace doesn’t care if we’re handling things, it only cares that we recognize the gift we’ve been given in being able to be loved even at our worst.

There’s this crazy freeing moment when we are able to sit in our filth and the crumbled pieces of our lives and feel loved. I would dare say that is the most powerful shift of all – to be loved at our absolute worst. And darling, that can’t happen if we’re constantly able to handle everything. What a beautiful thing we miss out on.

I’m not saying that crisis is glamorous. I will never say it. Crisis awful and painful and shreds every piece of our being – but what I am saying (and what I will say until I die) is that I’ve found the most wonderful thing underneath it all when I stopped believing that God would somehow pull through in giving me strength to handle things.

I’ve found grace and I’ve found love and I’ve found that both of these extend much further than whether our lives hold together or not. And that is the most beautiful thing of all.