Positively Overwhelmed

For my iniquities have gone over my head; like a heavy burden, they are too heavy for me (Psalm 38:4, ESV).

Overwhelmed. A feeling that I’m sure we can all relate to. It’s a feeling we all experience for different reasons at different times in our lives. We can find the feeling of being overwhelmed echoed throughout Scripture:

• David was overwhelmed by the guilt of his sins
• Noah was overwhelmed by the instructions to build an ark.
• Moses was overwhelmed by the thought of speaking to a crowd.
• Peter was overwhelmed by the waves around him.
• Judas was overwhelmed with his choice to betray Jesus.

Reading these situations, I can remember points in my life when I could have related to all of them – Overwhelmed and drowning in the guilt of my mistakes, carrying a heavy burden that felt like I couldn’t take another breath or step.

How about you? What weight are you carrying that feels like it is too heavy to go on any longer? What overwhelms you? Maybe it isn’t guilt but the pressures of work; maybe it is your schedule; maybe it is church duties; maybe it is all of the housework you need to get done but can’t find the time for; maybe it’s that relationship that seems broken beyond repair; maybe it is a medical diagnosis.

You may not be certain what it is, but you know it is something—something that nags at you constantly and keeps pulling you down. We all have an “it” that seems to overwhelm us. It weighs us down, takes our breath, and makes us feel like we can’t go on.

Overwhelmed.

It is a word that evokes an instant negative feeling.

But why? The word overwhelmed is not in itself negative. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it means to be overcome completely, buried beneath a mass of something – not something specifically negative – just something. If this is the case, why do we seem to always choose to apply it to our lives negatively?

What if instead, we made a different choice? What if we made a choice to be positively overwhelmed? If being overwhelmed means to be overcome completely by something, what if we chose to be overcome completely by God’s love? If it means to be buried beneath a mass of something, what if we chose to be buried beneath a mass of His grace and blessings?

Even though David cried out in Psalm 38:4 about the heaviness of his iniquities, he went on in Psalm 103:12 to declare that “as far as the East is from the West, so far does He remove our transgressions from us.”

Regardless of what the burden is that you carry; whether it is guilt, stress, fear, or anxiety……we can always find peace in knowing that God’s love is greater, and His grace is always enough to sustain us.

It is only through His love and grace that we can enter into each new day with a shift in our perspective, taking the feeling of being ‘overwhelmed’ from a negative word to a testament to our faith and His goodness.