Useful Thought #2

God never gives you more than you can handle

This concept is often interpreted as: God, personified, determines what situations you can only just handle, and then gives them to you every now and again when you need testing, perhaps, or for your own good, or for some other unfathomable reason of His own. This gives many people comfort, and I'm glad of that, but thinking of it this way doesn't make sense for me. I have my own take on it, which I may or may not have poached or co-opted from Byron Katie. It is as follows:

First, I substitute God for life or reality, i.e. what is: this moment, now. This is because I don't know whether or not God exists, but I can know that the present moment exists, or exists as much as something can exist. So, I interpret it as life, or the present moment, never gives you more than you can handle. How do I know that? Because you handle every moment -- if you weren't handling it, you would be dead. As I see it (and this is almost definitely poached from BK), there are two choices in every moment -- handle it, or die. But this isn't a choice you have to make consciously: you either handle it, or you die; therefore if you're not dead, you must be handling it. Even if you feel more rotten than you thought possible, and you think you are handling it badly and no-one could handle this situation worse than you are now, you are still handling it. And so I believe that 'God never gives you more than you can handle' is the literal truth. And even if you stop handling whatever it is and you die, all it means is you're now handling death, not life.

This is a wonderful thought to have in my head, but I will say that I often lose sight of it, especially when I'm in an anxiety attack, like I was this evening. But the Work gets me back onto it, always.