I love this time of year. As cliche as it is, there’s something about January that invites us to revel in possibility. There is so much potential and limitless opportunity.
Unfortunately, too often I choose “all of the above.”
And it’s not long before I’m an overwhelmed, stressed-out mess, resentful of my mile-long to-do list and anyone who asks one more thing of me.
Even more unfortunately, this dilemma is not limited to January.
Do you ever feel like you have too many tasks and too little time?
As a lifelong Catholic, I’m no stranger to the Gospels. Now I’m no theologian, but I’ve never encountered a passage that portrayed Jesus as a stressed-out mess. There are no verses of Him complaining (or humble-bragging!) about how busy He was.
We know very little about the time before his public ministry, but within those three years the Gospels go deep into, he was doing stuff. Good stuff. Important stuff. He was out with the people, traveling from place to place, preaching, healing, celebrating, mourning, and ministering to those around him.
And yet.
If you think about it, there were things He chose NOT to do. He regularly retreated to quiet places to pray even though there were still people who needed help. There were surely blind, deaf, and mute people living in the region who didn’t get healed. There were places He could have gone to preach to that he didn’t, people He could have dined with and didn’t.
One might wonder why this is so. I mean, He is God, after all.
The obvious answer is that He was also human.
Like us.
The reason we don’t see Jesus frantically running all through the Gospels all stressed out and complaining about how busy He was is that He was perfectly in line with God’s will. He knew his limitations as a human being and relied on God for the strength and guidance to accomplish the mission God had for Him.
Jesus left things “undone” because they were not His to do.
When I am in the zone of overwhelm, feeling like I have too much to do and not enough time, I know I’m doing something wrong.
Why?
Because as important as the items on my to-do list may be (or seem to be), “saving the world” is not among them. There is nothing you or I will ever do that is as consequential as what was on Jesus’ to-do list. And so if He could go about His day without being overwhelmed with stress, I should be able to as well.
I have to remind myself that if I’m feeling overwhelmed by my to-do list, it probably means I’m trying to do too much.
It could be that I’m trying to do God’s job for Him, or I’m trying to do tomorrow’s work today, or maybe I’ve taken on something He has reserved for someone else.
We’re supposed to be more like Jesus. And if Jesus wasn’t stressed out, then neither should we. If Jesus couldn’t say yes to everything, neither can we.
So how do we figure out where we’re overdoing it?
I dug this out of an old journal. I don’t remember where I got it or if I came up with it myself, but it’s a good strategy for dealing with overwhelm:
Sit down with God and a cup of coffee. Put your to-do list on the table in front of you. Ask God two simple questions: What on this list is there because of you? What on this list is there because of me?
Keep the answers to the first question on your to-do list.
You’ll feel less overwhelmed when you let go of the answers to the second one.
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