Sorry, but God Does ABSOLUTELY Give Us More Than We Can Handle
Posted on August 14th, 2015 by Adam-Troy CastroOriginally published on Facebook Aug 14 2013.
I confess that I was reminded of my hatred for this particular homily by an article read earlier today that listed the top ten worst things to say to the parent of a disabled child. I do not have that life circumstance but have had it used on me, when I was suffering under one intolerable problem or another.
“God never gives us more than we can handle.”
This is used by people who mean to comfort us, by putting our problems, however severe, in a little box.
As the article I read today noted, it’s a more polite way to say a very impolite thing: “Stop whining.”
But it’s a lie.
Of COURSE God — or if you prefer, random circumstance — gives us more than we can handle.
People go bankrupt. People have mental and emotional breakdowns. People throw screaming fits. People get ulcers. The most brutal stress descends on those who are most ill-equipped to handle it. Lives are destroyed. People have tension-induced strokes. They sink into drug dependencies, or kill themselves.
“God never gives us more than we can handle.”
What self-serving claptrap!
Okay. So imagine you’re a Japanese guy minding his own business on some coastal city, and you hear a tremendous rumbling and look up and there’s a wall of water racing toward you carrying with it a debris field made of shattered houses, floating automobiles, sewage and corpses.
Don’t worry! God trusts in you to handle it!
Imagine you’re a guy who takes a shortcut through the park one night which happens to be the same night some woman is raped and beaten to the point of coma and the cops happen to miss that this completely fits the pattern of some serial rapes you were out of town for and you are demonized in the press and sent to prison and ten years pass and everybody you know thinks you’re guilty and only you know you’re not and by the way you have gotten yourself on the wrong side of the prison’s most brutal gang.
Don’t worry! God trusts in you to handle it!
Imagine you have been told you have a rare genetic ailment that will, in the next fourteen months, completely ravage your nervous system and leave you paralyzed and unable to speak for what will otherwise be a very long life, and you’re only twenty but forced to give up all your dreams and just as you manage to come to terms with that your insurance company defaults and you have to give up your chance to stay at home and instead have to move into a facility that promises state of the art care but that, you realize after you have been there less than a week, is a snake pit with attendants who take a sadistic pleasure in tormenting the helpless when their bosses aren’t looking.
Don’t worry! God trusts in you to handle it!
“God never gives us more than we can handle?”
Of all the aphorisms spouted by the well-meaning, this may be the most idiotic and contemptuous of real-world illustration.