It’s been a little while since I’ve been in this space to write. I’ve come here several times, attempting to put words to where I am, but each time it felt as though the English language had failed me. I couldn’t seem to find the right words—words big enough, honest enough, or tender enough to express what has been happening in my heart.
Lately, I’ve felt the weight of a lot of things. And if I’m honest, the one word that keeps coming to mind is overwhelmed.
Everything has felt heavy lately. Not just difficult, but heavy. It has felt costly, and at times, the emotional cost has seemed greater than what I have in my emotional bank account. My heart has felt weighed down. My mind has felt crowded. And I won’t lie—I’ve spent more time worrying than being grateful.
It has felt as though I somehow gave my mind permission to race from one thought to another, one concern to the next, constantly trying to process, solve, anticipate, and prepare. There have been so many things happening, seemingly all at once, and I’ve found myself struggling to catch my breath in the middle of it all.
And if I’m being completely honest, there has been another layer to this.
As a believer in Jesus, I initially found myself feeling guilty for being overwhelmed. I questioned myself. If I trust God, why do I feel this way? If I believe He is faithful, why does my heart feel so heavy? If my faith is real, shouldn’t I be handling all of this differently?
Maybe you’ve asked yourself some of those same questions.
Maybe you’ve wondered if being overwhelmed means your faith is weak. Maybe you’ve quietly criticized yourself for struggling when you believe you should be trusting. Maybe you’ve smiled, showed up, kept going, and told everyone that you’re okay while internally wondering how much more you can carry.
But what if being overwhelmed is not evidence that we have stopped trusting God?
What if overwhelm is simply an honest acknowledgment that we are carrying more than we were created to carry alone?
I’ve been thinking about that.
I’ve been learning that there is a difference between being overwhelmed and being without hope. There is a difference between having a weary heart and having a faithless heart. There is a difference between struggling to carry something and refusing to place it in God’s hands.
And perhaps we need permission to acknowledge that difference.
Because sometimes faith doesn’t look like having all the answers. Sometimes faith looks like coming to God with trembling hands and an exhausted heart and simply saying, “Lord, this is too much for me.”
As I’ve been processing the emotions I’ve been carrying lately, a passage of Scripture from Psalms keeps coming to mind. What strikes me about this passage is its honesty. The writer doesn’t seem interested in pretending that everything is okay. He doesn’t hide his exhaustion. He doesn’t clean up his emotions before bringing them to God.
He brings God the truth.
And maybe that is where I want to begin.
Not with pretending I’m okay.
Not with trying to make my faith look stronger than I feel.
Not with rushing past the discomfort of being overwhelmed.
But by sitting with it.
By asking what overwhelm is trying to tell me. By exploring what happens within us when life feels heavier than our capacity to carry it. By considering what it means to bring that heaviness honestly before God.
So, I invite you to sit with me for a moment.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, I hope you’ll find yourself somewhere in these words. And if you are overwhelmed right now, I hope you won’t feel ashamed of it.
Let’s look deeply and intentionally at this passage of Scripture together.
Let’s explore what it means to be overwhelmed—and what it might look like to discover God there, too.
The first time I read this passage of Scripture, I could relate to David so deeply. I was struck by how raw, honest, and open he was about his emotions. David did not try to hide what he was feeling or soften his words. He gave God the full expression of his pain.
He describes his experience through the imagery of water and mud. David cries out to God to save him because the waters have risen to his neck. To me, this sounds like someone who is completely overwhelmed—someone who has reached a point where there is very little room left to breathe.
It made me wonder: What was happening in David’s life that caused him to feel this overwhelmed? What was the story behind these words? What had he experienced that brought him to this place of desperation?
There is something deeply intimate about the way David speaks to God. His words are desperate, but they are also vulnerable. He does not pretend that he is okay. He tells God exactly where he is.
David goes on to say that he has sunk into deep mud and cannot find his footing. Can you imagine what that must feel like? Being surrounded by thick, heavy mud, trying to move but finding that every step is difficult. The harder you try to get out, the more stuck you may feel.
David sounds stuck. He sounds as though he is struggling to move in any direction but cannot find solid ground beneath his feet. There is no stability. No clear path forward. Just the exhausting feeling of trying to survive while desperately searching for something firm to stand on.
Then David describes himself as being in deep waters, with a flood sweeping over him. The water is no longer simply around him—it is overtaking him. It is rising, surrounding him, and threatening to pull him under.
And then comes the part that perhaps feels most human to me:
“I am weary from my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God.”
David has cried until he is exhausted. His throat is dry from calling out. His eyes are tired from looking and waiting for God.
There is something profoundly compassionate about this passage because David shows us that faith does not mean we never become overwhelmed. It does not mean we never feel stuck, exhausted, desperate, or afraid. Sometimes faith looks like crying out to God from the middle of the mud and the deep waters and simply saying, “Save me.”
David’s prayer reminds me that God can handle our honesty. We do not have to clean up our emotions before we bring them to Him. We can come to Him when the waters are rising, when we cannot find our footing, when we are exhausted from crying, and when we are desperately searching for Him.
David came to God exactly as he was.
Maybe that is part of the invitation in this passage: to come to God exactly as we are, even when we are overwhelmed, even when we are weary, and even when we cannot see a way out.
So, we have looked at an intimate account in the Bible—one that feels like the writer was writing from a deeply overwhelmed place.
There is so much to consider in this passage.
David wasn’t trying to hide anything from God. He wasn’t trying to clean up his words, make his emotions more acceptable, or pretend that he was okay when he wasn’t. He was raw. He was honest. He told God exactly where he was in that moment.
And maybe that is one of the greatest takeaways for us: we can be honest about our feelings of overwhelm.
It is okay to sit with those feelings for a moment.
It is okay to ask ourselves, What is feeding this feeling of overwhelm? What am I carrying? What has become too heavy? What am I afraid of? What do I need right now?
Sometimes we are so quick to push overwhelm away that we never stop long enough to understand what it is trying to tell us.
And maybe we need to give ourselves permission to simply acknowledge, I am overwhelmed.
Not as an admission of failure, but as an honest acknowledgment of where we are.
And it is okay to be honest with God about it, too.
We can tell Him where we are.
We can tell Him what we are feeling.
We can tell Him what hurts.
We can tell Him what we are afraid of.
We can tell Him why we are overwhelmed.
He already knows.
But there is something sacred about telling Him anyway.
Sometimes telling God what is happening inside of us becomes our moment of release. Not because saying the words magically changes everything, but because we no longer have to carry the weight of pretending.
David showed us that we don’t have to come to God polished.
We can come overwhelmed.
We can come exhausted.
We can come confused.
We can come with tears.
We can come with questions.
We can come with the parts of ourselves that don’t yet know how to make sense of what we are experiencing.
And if you are feeling overwhelmed right now, I want you to know something:
You are not alone.
I want you to know that I feel you.
I see you.
In some ways, I am you.
I am trying my best to believe that the waters will not drown me, too.
I don’t always know how the story will unfold. I don’t always know how long the waters will rise or how long I will have to wait for them to recede.
But I am choosing to believe that God meets us there.
Not just after the overwhelm.
In it.
I truly believe that God will meet us in that place of overwhelmed.
I believe He wants to be there with us—not standing at a distance, waiting for us to get ourselves together, but meeting us right in the middle of the deep water.
Maybe the invitation isn’t always to immediately figure out how to get out of the water.
Maybe, sometimes, the invitation is to be honest about the fact that we’re in it.
To name it.
To explore it.
To bring it to God.
And to trust that even when the waters have risen to our necks, we are not beyond His reach.
Maybe overwhelm doesn’t have to be the place where we hide.
Maybe it can become the place where we learn to be honest—with ourselves, with God, and with the people who love us.
So if you’re overwhelmed today, take a breath.
You don’t have to pretend here.
Tell the truth about where you are.
And then, perhaps, whisper the simplest prayer:
“God, I am overwhelmed. Meet me here.” I am so grateful that you are here in this space with me. Please take a seat, kick your shoes off, put your feet up and rest here in the beauty of the light.
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