Admitting To Overload

Have you ever had a day like this? (Slide 1) Video Clip from youtube.com entitled ‘elastic stress.’

How many of you have had stress this week? How many of you experienced stress as the result of a major issue or conflict?

How many of you experienced stress this week due to a series of issues that seem to pile on top of one another? How many of you experienced stress this week due to a minor inconvenience?

How do you deal with stress? Does it depend on the level and type of stress? Or is stress just plain stress no matter its cause or source or its level of intensity?

Well, as I did my research for this morning, I found a new stress buster that I think we need to rent (if we can find one) for our church picnic next year.

(Slide 2) Video Clip from youtube.com entitled ‘two men zorbing…’

Did you hear the two GROWN men inside that clear ball? It is called Zorbing… Z-O-R-B-I-N-G. It is very popular in Europe. I think that what we need to do is set up a track at the top of the hill over looking the west beach at Bixler Lake and then take turns going down the hill and into the lake.

(Slide 3) Stress and overload go together don’t they? What would you say to that stressed out office worker or this couple to help them deal with their stress?

Today is the first sermon in a series that I am calling, ‘How to Deal with Overload: Saying ‘No’ So We Can Say ‘Yes.’ And the first thing that we must do to properly deal with overload is to admit to the existence of overload.

(Slide 4) Our main text for this morning comes from 1 Peter 5:7 which says, Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about what happens to you. Notice that the verse does not say give only a few of our worries and cares to God. What does it say? Give all your worries and cares to God..

God does care about what happens to us. He is not a distant God who simply creates us and then stands aside and allows things to happen. He is a God who wants to help us with our worries and our cares.

(Slide 5) But just how do we let God help us with our worries and cares?

I think that the first thing we have to do is to admit that we are overloaded and that because we are we have worries and cares that God needs to take off of our hands. And I think that the kind of admission that we need to have is in the line of AA’s first Step. ‘We admitted that we were overloaded that our lives had become unmanageable.’

Now frankly this is hard for us to do. We do not want to admit that something has got us licked. This is America after all and we don’t need anybody’s help, right? Wrong.

If we are going to learn to say ‘no’ to the things in life we need to say ‘no’ to so that we can say ‘yes’ to the things we need to say ‘yes’ to – God and family are two things that come to mind – then we have to at some point admit that we are overloaded – financially, time wise, emotionally, occupationally – and ask God for help. But how?

By learning to give and continuously give our worries and our cares to God. (Slide 6) This means that we start developing the habit of surrendering our worries and cares to God as often as we need to. That may be, for a time, daily, hourly, or each second.

Let’s talk about habits for a moment. What is a habit? (Slide 7) A habit is, according to the Webster’s 2 Riverside Dictionary:

• A repetitive behavior

• Usual practice or manner

• An addiction

• A distinctive dress or costume

Now when it comes to habits, I think that we focus on the first and third definitions. Habits are therefore bad things not good things.

However, in developing the habit of surrendering our worries and cares to God, we need to think of the habit of doing so in line with the second definition, ‘usual practice or manner.’ This is the positive aspect of developing habits.

Our health is based, in part, on the habit of things like teeth brushing, a balanced diet, and adequate rest. When we don’t practice these habits we have bad breath and tooth decay, our weight gives us problems, and we get cranky! If we are going to deal with overload then, we have to develop the proactive life building and life giving habits of surrendering our worries and cares to God as often as we need to.