Spread Too Thin

Thank you Logan Wolfram  for today’s message.  

“I know I don’t look it…but I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”  Bilbo’s words from Lord of the Rings rattle in my head. You’ve probably felt the same way at some point too, right?

Even the basic demands of life can leave us feeling over extended and stretched out. You spread thin across jobs, spouses, children, church, extracurriculars, and whatever else wants to suck time and energy away from you. Sometimes what’s left of us is so thin it feels as if we have become nearly translucent. Eventually, to avoid anything that requires more, we began to avoid anyone who wants more too.  All the spreading thin will eventually scrape away even the good parts life. When you have nothing left to give, if you give at all, people just get whatever is left over.

But here’s the thing, you may look ok. The pieces that are visible from the outside appear put together. But instead of running your life, it seems more accurate that life is running you.

I know you get this. You’re living and loving and doing your thing and somehow find yourself in a place where you hardly even know what’s happening anymore. Life isn’t happening with you, it’s happening to you.  One day you’re doing the planning, and then something weird happens and all the planning is now the ruling factor of your life.  Jobs, kids, spouses, sports, carpools, church, friends…it is all too much and you become mechanical in your execution of tasks or you shut down completely.

I get it friend. I burned the candle at both ends for a long time.  Somewhere in there though the candle broke in half and I found myself burning both sides of the candle at both ends and whatever was left in the middle got burned up.  Which really means that I burned out.

And what probably burned me out more than anything else was when I inadvertently started burning bridges that I didn’t even mean to set fire to at all. I hurt friends because I didn’t make time for them. I felt alone because I was so overwhelmed that I disconnected myself from the people and activities around me that I loved. I stopped doing things that I enjoyed like art, or creative projects, even cooking dinners that tasted good.  But dinner wasn’t the only thing that had lost it’s seasoning, my entire life had begun to feel that way too.

When it comes to making extra space for neighbors or friends or even just one more person, sometimes it feels like you just can’t.

2 Corinthians 12:5 reminds us that we need not boast about ourselves, except about our weaknesses.  Because it is in our weakness, that the Lord makes us strong. In a very area of his life where Paul struggled and asked the Lord to remove the struggle, Jesus said to him “ “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” He goes on to declare that he would “boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.^⁠1“

I know what it is to be worn out, spread too thin, stretched beyond my limits, and I know that’s not the way you want to begin a new year either.

Scripture is full of people who felt not enough and spread thin across too much. But as we begin to search the Word of God to find more in our thin places, it seems most often the greatest thing God asks is that we trust Him even (and especially) when we come up short.

He asks us to offer what little we have to him so that He can make much of our offering. And in doing so, He makes much of His goodness to us. In the places where we have little, he promises to make more. In the areas we feel weak, when we lean into Him instead of ourselves, he promises to make us strong. He takes the moment we come with little left to give and blesses us with a Kingdom kind of leftovers that aren’t so much all that remains, as they show God’s abundance, excess, sufficiency, and strength.

Maybe spread too thin is the very place that God wants to show us exactly how much abundance there is for us? That instead of trying to spread ourselves over the world around us, we can uncover what can be when we spread our lives across the abundance that is the Bread of Heaven himself.

Have a ThirtyOne-derful day!

Where You Sit Is How You Stand

The words that reduced me to tears came from a Dove Soap video produced in France:
“You have a big chest and short legs. Some women can make that work. But you … you’ve got no charm. You’re just fat and ordinary.”
“Every time you smile, those baby teeth you have make you look like a mouse.”
“Sit straight up so your belly doesn’t look so big.”

In the video, women had been asked to record a journal with all the thoughts they had about themselves throughout the day. Dove then turned the women’s thoughts into a dialogue that played at a street café within earshot of several other tables, including tables where the original women sat.

Strangers overhearing the conversation were appalled to hear how the women spoke to one another, and they interrupted the exchange.
“That’s so violent what you’re saying to her! You should stop. Your words are so unkind.”

When the original women realized those spoken words were the thoughts they’d written in their journals, they were mortified.
“It’s so horrifying. I hope my daughter never speaks to herself like that,” one woman observed.

I sat weeping at my kitchen table through the whole video, realizing it wasn’t just those women. I do it too. So many of us do. Over and over we devalue ourselves. Over and over we choose to believe lies over truth.
But we cannot walk into our full potential in Christ when we falsely believe who God created us to be falls woefully short.

How often and easily do we forget our value? How often do we believe lies of the world instead of words from our Creator about us? We set aside the truth that Jesus came and lived and died to prove to us we are of great value to the God of the heavens. Even Dove Soap sees our value. Our renowned Creator has given us inherent value. Yet, we call “ugly” what God calls a “masterpiece.” (Ephesians 2:10, NLT) And then we operate according to the lies and lose the capacity to follow Him.

How we minimize Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice when we insist that more must be done to redeem our messy lives. We make Satan’s job so simple. He plants one tiny lie somewhere along the path, and we take it all the way to our own self-destruction.
We all have them, those lies we believe. Then we adopt new ideas we think will cover them. But eventually the facade cracks, and the old lies remain … still distorting our beliefs about everything. Instead of moving forward in curiosity after God, we get stuck on lies about ourselves. It’s time we learn to uncover the lies, to name them, to call them out! Time to stop believing them and replace them with Christ’s truth.

I get it, though. We forget what God says about our identity in Him. We get wrapped up in things around us. Our families and jobs require so much of us we can lose ourselves — and turn into people we never thought we’d become. The harsh reality of life exploits and exposes us. So we turn inward and try to protect what little we think remains. We know there is more to life, but we don’t even have the energy to be curious about it. Then one day we wake up lost and don’t know how to get back to what or who we used to be.

You are not what you do. Your value isn’t decided by a number on the tag in the back of your jeans, your profession or by your roles: career woman, wife, mom, sister, friend, etc. Those are gifts you have, traits you exhibit. But they don’t define the core of your being. You aren’t the sum of your mistakes or the messed-up identity you once wore.
Your identity is simple. It’s clear. It’s beautiful. Your identity is purely who God says you are. Beautiful, redeemed, renamed, engraved on the hands of Christ, where you will never be forgotten.

I recently heard it said that “the things around us can’t define how we stand, when we’re actually seated with God” because:
“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Colossians 3:1-4, NIV).

Where we sit determines how we stand. So stand tall in your seats, sisters. Stand true in honor and dignity and kindness and grace. Wear the truth that was made for you. Toss off the raggedy clothes of mistaken identity and put on the “garments of salvation” and “robe of righteousness” found in Isaiah 61:10, that are yours in Christ Jesus.

Thank you  Logan Wolfman.