A while back my son's middle school had a big event with water balloons, food, games, etc. Afterward, I found this and thought it looked cool (because I'm weird that way). The rainbow bands are evidence of tension and stress. The balloons were stretched or filled beyond their capacity and burst.
We all face hard situations and sometimes feel like we are on the verge of hitting or surpassing our limits, about to break like those balloons. While I believe it is good and healthy to be transparent about things like stress, burnout, relationships, etc., I also wonder if sometimes we sabotage ourselves with the power of suggestion and our drive to diagnose and help ourselves.
Occasionally, I receive free Christian books for Kindle. Several recent titles I received deal with such topics as burnout, stress, expectations not being met, failure, forgiveness, disillusionment, and disappointment. They all had lists of symptoms so readers could self-diagnose. It occurred to me that the more focused I became on some of these, the easier it became to "see" myself in them. My grandmother used to say if you look hard enough for something, you'll find it. I began to feel like maybe I wasn't helping myself any by spending my time focusing on all that stuff. Maybe I wouldn't feel so tightly stretched mentally and emotionally if I spent less time and energy fixating on the problems.
Yes, I live in a hard place and have stress and fatigue. Yes, I have had unrealistic expectations and the ensuing disappointments. We all have. But I am learning that the solution is not to jump on the burnout bandwagon or the stress train, but to go to Jesus. Continuously. He promised if we turn to Him with our weariness of all the stupid stuff in this world, He will give us rest.
Those books I read were all good and were written to help people. I would even recommend some of them to others when appropriate. But I think I have had too much of a good thing lately, and it began to supersede the best thing in my thoughts. For now I am giving myself a rest from the "self-help" genre of literature. One less thing to stretch my mind around. I tend to let them have too much prominence in my considerations when I should be thinking on what God has to say to me in His Book.
