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In This Issue...
Articles
- A Theology of Humor by Cheryl Taylor
- Ministering With Humor by Stephanie Nance
- Christian Leaders Having Fun? by Pam Morton with Kathy Jingling
- The Health Benefits of Humor and Laughter by Dwenda Gjerdingen, MD, MS
Resources
Book Reviews
- Anatomy of an Illness by Norman Cousins
- The Purse-Driven Life by Anita Renfroe
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OVERLOAD: Learning To Live With Limits
January 1996 will go down as a dangerously cold month for western Wisconsin. During one particularly cold blizzard, we were warned not to travel unless absolutely necessary: the wind chill factor was 80 degrees below zero.
Still, on an otherwise routine Friday evening, who wouldn’t want to at least attempt the 150-mile trip home after work? And so this 44-year-old mother of two set out into the storm. But 300 yards from her rural home, her vehicle slid into a snowdrift. Leaving the car, she headed off on foot across a field. The next morning, they found her frozen body, a mere 100 feet from her front porch.
This woman assumed her body heat was greater than nature’s cold. She was tragically wrong. Serious errors in judgment are seldom free from consequences. Sometimes we die. Sometimes we just get hurt. But when the context of living is dangerous, we ought not underestimate the risks nor overestimate our abilities.
Knowing Our Limits
Do you think a human being will ever swim across the Pacific Ocean? Run a one-minute mile? Go six months without sleeping?
Neither do I. But why not? We have made many improvements in the science of human performance. Today we can call upon nutritionists, weight trainers, and sports psychologists. We have computer software to enhance training techniques. Amazing performance records are being set every day.
Nevertheless, the answer to the question "why not?" is simple: the established fact of human limits. No matter how stoic or spiritual we are, we are finite. For every human being, there is a measurable point that defines the threshold of that person’s limits. From person to person there is often great variability in this threshold. Yet, for everyone, such a threshold undeniably exists.
Load Vs. Overload
To understand the performance implications of our limits, let’s go jogging. If we run one mph (actually, a slow walk) and decide to increase to one mph, that feels good. It is a doubling of our performance; yet it is easy to do. If we decide to increase our speed from six mph to seven mph, perhaps this experience is less pleasant. Still, it is satisfying. Going fast is fun and it feels productive. But how about going from 14 to 15 mph? How does that feel? Painful. Unbearable. Impossible. In each scenario, we only increased our speed one mile per hour, but our perceptions of each experience were radically different. We evolved from ease to challenge to pain. It is important to recognize that running is not the problem. Neither is running fast the problem. Running too fast is the problem.
The fact of limits is important for today’s culture. Because of the rapidly changing conditions of modern living—largely due to progress always giving us more and more of everything faster and faster—we are exceeding our limits in scores of areas all at the same time. The pain is palpable. People everywhere are collapsing in exhaustion, wondering what hit them.
What hit them was overload. This can be defined as the point at which our limits are exceeded. Load is not the problem. Over is the problem. We have all heard about the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Once a camel is maximally loaded, a mere straw will cause the break. Again, the problem is not the load—camels love to carry loads. The problem is overload.
A Full Plate
When we, or our clients, are on the unsaturated side of our limits, we can be open and expansive. We can say yes to new opportunities and assignments and obligations. This all feels productive and appropriate.
Once we cross the threshold of our limits, however, we reach saturation. Here, the rules of living totally change. We can’t factor anything more into our lives until we take something away. As elementary as this principle seems, it remains largely invisible.
If, in a smorgasbord line, we fill our plates to overflowing, obviously no more food can be placed on the plate until something is taken off. In life, as in the smorgasbord, our plates fill up sooner than we realize. In attempting to be sociable, we try to accommodate everyone’s invitations. In attempting to be good parents, we try to give our children more opportunities than we had. In attempting to be good providers, we accept extra work assignments. In attempting to be compassionate counselors, we want to help with everyone’s problems.
Nearly everyone I know has a full plate, but most of us haven’t completely thought through the performance implications of our saturated states. We continue to say yes even when yes is no longer an option.
If we agree that we have limits (a major accomplishment for some people), then the next logical question is: How do we know when we have reached these limits? If a car overheats, an indicator light goes on alerting us to the danger—the engine is about to burn up. If the electrical system is discharging rather than charging, another light goes on alerting us to the danger—the car is about to shut down.
Unfortunately, God did not equip us with such a warning system. There is no red light on top of our heads that blinks on and off when we hit 95 percent, followed by a siren when we exceed 100 percent. For most of us, and for most of our clients, pain is the first clue that we have an overloaded condition.
Limits And Theology
Recently I noticed a T-shirt with the phrase No Limits! emblazoned across the front. To support the slogan, several Bible verses on the shirt state that God is the God of the impossible and that we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength. These are wonderful biblical concepts about the power and sovereignty of God, to be sure. But let’s examine the idea further.
How should the reality of human limitations be reconciled with such verses as Philippians 4:13 ("I can do all things.")? Are our limits a result of the Fall, or intentionally designed by God? Are limits something we should vigorously resist, or something we should accept as being the framework within which God desires us to work? The answers to such questions are enormously important, yet seldom considered in our rush to busyness and productivity.
God is the intentional author of our limits, and He placed them within us for two essential reasons: to protect us from overload, and to keep us from inflating our roles in life to godlike proportions. When we violate the limits placed within us, God is under no moral obligation to bail us out of our pain. Accepting Christ as Savior solves the lostness problem but does not grant an exemption from the overload problem.
Margins
I know all about overload. In l982, it sat on my chest and blew smoke in my face. As a result, I decided to make a career change and to embark on a journey of investigation and a personal pilgrimage for renewal. Having always loved teaching, I switched from the private practice of medicine to the world of academic medicine. At the same time, I surprised even myself by accepting a half-time position and passing over the full-time vacancy. My non-medical time I dedicated to balancing my life, nourishing my relationships, and better understanding the forces that were so chaotically propelling our culture. If we were all riding a cork in the Atlantic during hurricane season, I wanted to better understand the wind and waves.
During the subsequent decade of research, one contemporary phenomenon impressed me as being responsible for more pain than I would ever have imagined. I noticed it in the lives of my patients, my colleagues, and my friends and neighbors. I even noticed it grimacing back at me in the mirror. It was the absence of margin.
Margin is related to our reserves and is best defined as the space between our load and our limits. Unfortunately, margin has recently disappeared. Progress killed it. Margin and overload are opposites. Yet, as we have seen, overload is clearly the majority American experience. From activity overload to choice overload to debt overload to information overload to work overload, we are a piled-on, marginless society.
Maximizing everything has, of course, become the American way. We push limits as far as possible. This philosophy has become not only business dogma but also standard operating procedure for nearly every sociologic experience. We spend 10 percent more than we have—whether it be money, time, or energy. We work hard, spend hard, play hard, entertain hard, vacation hard, and crash hard.
The more I studied the phenomenon of margin, the more I understood its importance. And the more I understood its importance, the more I yearned for its freedom in my own life. Carefully and even forcefully, my wife and I carved out margin in four areas: emotional energy, physical energy, time, and finances. As we did, 90 percent of our pain disappeared.
Radical Vs. Incremental
Many who are desperate for something other than a daily diet of stress and overload yearn to regain margin in their lives. Two roads lead in the margin direction. One road is radical change. The second is incremental change. Both aim for the same destination, but the first gets you there more quickly.
A small (but growing) percentage of stressed-out Americans are ready for sweeping change. They have coexisted with overload for years and are tired. When they see a restructuring that makes sense emotionally and spiritually, they want nothing more than to sweep away the old and replace it with something better.
Such a decision might entail cutting work hours, getting a different job, having one spouse leave the workforce, buying a smaller house, relocating in another state or country, or selling expensive cars, boats or planes. Most of these changes require considerable simplification.
This approach can be very helpful in reestablishing margin. The caution, however, is not to undertake such an important restructuring on impulse. The more important the decision, the longer we should deliberate.
Most people are not able or willing to consider radical solutions to life’s problems. These people are weary, to be sure. But, fearing the disruption and even chaos of sudden change, they prefer to ease their way out of the torment one step at a time.
This group, therefore, is more inclined toward the “baby steps” approach to establishing margin. The caution in this scenario, however, is that many of our lives are so marginless that incremental revisions might not accomplish enough substantive change to decompress the pain. In this case, my advice is to do something bolder.
Intentional Living
It is axiomatic that the flow of today’s culture is in the direction of overload. My recommendation is that we should try to live more intentionally. If the world pushes, push back. Practically speaking, there are ways to avoid overload and cultivate margins within the framework of God’s design for our lives and ministries.
Accept responsibility. Never relinquish control of your schedule to the unpredictable and sometimes ruthless whims of the world or the demands of others. Be active in self-examination and intentional in remediation. Nobody is locked into anything. Each of us can accomplish the needed changes if we want them badly enough.
Acknowledge your limits. Schedule your days more sanely, more humanely, and more relationally. Stop apologizing for wanting a good night’s sleep, and stop believing that "well-rested" is a synonym for "sluggardly."
Understand God’s will. God "never guides us into an intolerable scramble of panting feverishness," observed Thomas Kelly. "We will gain more time by properly understanding God’s will for us than by all the time-saving suggestions put together," added Robert Banks. "Discover what God’s will is for you and all the time you need to fulfill it will come your way."
Consciously slow the pace of life. The pace of life has become deadly. We simply cannot permit each year to bring a five percent increase in speed and not get caught in the exhausting consequences of such frenzy. The green pastures and still waters are awaiting us—but not in the direction the treadmill is spinning.
Define and defend your boundaries. Jesus did not heal everybody in Israel, even though He could have. Because it is not necessary to have more compassion than the Almighty, sometimes I don’t answer my telephone.
Learn to say no. It is easy to say no to a root canal or flexible sigmoidoscopy. But it is difficult to say no to things that are interesting and enjoyable. Yet if we do not learn to say no, overload will overwhelm.
Get less done, but do the right things. Consider doing less, but radically prioritizing. Remember—the multiplying coefficient for our labor is the power of the Holy Spirit. The same God who spoke the universe into existence sees our faithful efforts and instructs the Holy Spirit to expand the benefit to whatever level best glorifies Him.
A Callous Christ?
Jesus never seemed to be in a hurry. The Scriptures never mention His running. There is no indication that He worked 24-hour ministry days. He went to sleep each night without having healed every disease in Israel—and He apparently slept well. Neither did He visit all in need or teach all in need.
Is this to imply that Jesus was lazy, that He didn’t do His best, that He was callous? Of course not. But it is to say that He understood what it meant to be human. Jesus understood what it meant to have limits. Jesus knew what it meant to prioritize and balance in light of those limits and how to focus on the truly important.
Apparently, Jesus believed that very little of lasting spiritual or emotional value happens in the presence of speed. Jesus understood that busyness, productivity, and efficiency are speed words, not Kingdom words. Jesus understood that rest is important. Jesus understood that meditation, wisdom, and worship are slow, mellow, and deep. Jesus didn’t outrun Satan—He outloved him.
Perhaps some of us are signed up for the wrong race. The people who come to us for counseling often need help in setting margins. But remember—counselors need margins too!
Reprinted from CHRISTIAN COUNSELING TODAY, Vol. 4 No. 3, with permission from the American Association of Christian Counselors Inc.
