“God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” many have spoken to me in times of really hard things. It often makes me feel like the Lord has a funny idea of the things that I am capable of handling.
However the saying is not true. He absolutely gives us more than we can handle. He shows this time and time again throughout Scripture, when his people are tasked with things that seem insurmountable, in times of grief and loss and famine.
I’m sure you know Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, but to give you a future and a hope.”
But have you read the verses that follow?? “Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity” (Jer 29:12-14).
We often see grief, loss and hardship as a punishment, but these are very human thoughts. We don’t think like God. Isaiah says that his ways are higher than ours — he sits high up in the mountain tops, while we are in the middle of a forest but only see the trees right around us.
His purposes are eternal, good, purposeful. His chief goal is his glory and the sanctification of his people. And he often uses the hard things to shape us more like Christ.
John Calvin said, “Since God knows well how strongly inclined by nature to a slavish love of this world, in order to prevent us from clinging too strongly to it, he employs the fittest reason for calling us back, and shaking off our lethargy. … [He] makes his people sensible of the vanity is the present life, by a constant proof of its miseries.”
When we call to him in our suffering, we find him. This is not for our harm. Many of the times we walk through difficulty and hard things, and it is not to punish us, but rather to make us more like Jesus and to draw us closer to himself.
We may not always know what the Lord is doing, we may not understand all of his purposes and plans until we get to glory, but we do know who He is: a steadfast God who holds us fast in the middle of great difficulty. He walks with us through the valleys of life and he will guide us safely through.