Overwhelmed?

2 Samuel 7:1-14a; Psalm 89:20-37; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-44
Audio Version

I was reading recently, and I discovered that Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft is now worth about $80 billion. That number is so hard to get a handle on. Let me try to help you.

Harrison County, WV has a population of about 60,000 people. Mountaineer Stadium in Morgantown holds about 80,000 people when full. Now let me put Bill Gates’ fortune in this manner – if Bill Gates gave every person at Mountaineer Stadium ten thousand dollars, Gates would still have $79 Billion left over.

If Bill Gates were sitting in this room, and we found the average net worth of everyone in the room, our net worth would be about $800 million each – and that assumes each of us is dead broke except for Bill Gates, which is close enough to the truth!

If Gates puts his money in the bank and earns just 1% interest on that money, he will earn about $2.5 million a day, or about $100,000 per hour. Think of it – he can buy a new house every hour, every day, pay cash, and not ever go broke!

Gates was raised in a Congregationalist church and now is a practicing Catholic. He has taken billions of his money and put it into his foundation, where he works to cure malaria and improve education world wide. He hasn’t worked at Microsoft in a year, but is now spending his tremendous mind working on problems that will help people worldwide. This is one billionaire we shouldn’t complain about.

The numbers, though, kind of overwhelm us, don’t they?

Jesus’ disciples were overwhelmed, too. Jesus told them it was time to get some rest. So they tried to go on vacation.

What happened?

They went on vacation in a boat, and the crowds followed them on shore. When they got to their “quiet place”, the crowds were waiting on them. They had gone to the beach during May to beat the rush, but the beach was filled with a Biker Convention and college spring break at the same time!

But rather than turn around or send away the crowds, Jesus taught them. And at the end of the day, when the disciples simply want to be left alone, to get a chance to rest, to get a chance to eat a bite and when the disciples say to Jesus, “send these people away so they can find someone to sell them food”, Jesus says, “No, you feed them”. And the disciples look out over the crowd and there are at least five thousand men and probably three times that in women and children. Feed twenty thousand people an hour from now with what you have on hand. That means they need about 5 tons of bread or 2 ½ tons of fish. It will cost them 6 months wages – the equivalent of $20,000 – to feed them all. The disciples are overwhelmed with the problem. Wouldn’t you be overwhelmed, too?

Other things can overwhelm us, too.

In our daily lives, most people in America complain of being overwhelmed. There is always too much work to do, too many problems to solve, too many things going on. We think that retirement is the solution, but for most people it isn’t. Most people recently retired report today that since they’ve been retired, they are busier than ever. There is something about us that makes us take on more and more tasks until we collapse, overwhelmed at the length of our “to do” list.

Work is something, but then there are the children and grandchildren. We spend our hours and days driving people around, cooking meals, cleaning up rooms, fixing our homes, creating or buying presents, working at the food pantry and running to choir practice. We call people on the phone and we mow the yard. About the time we get half-way through the yard, we have to repair the mower. And after two trips to Lowe’s for parts – never one trip – we come back home to find that a tree has fallen down in the back yard and need cutting up.

Meanwhile, at work the boss asks us for a special report that will only take a couple of hours, but those couple of hours have to be in the evening and we fall farther behind. And then, while we are finishing up the report at work, we get a phone call that our spouse’s mother has fallen and been taken to the hospital emergency room and we need to go right then and there. We go to fill up with gas and discover that we only have ten dollars to last til Friday. And then we discover while we’re at the ER that she has a previously undiagnosed disease which means she will need twice-weekly visits to doctors and hospitals and in-home care and we go home and sit there on the couch with a blank stare, wondering when it will all end.

Or worse yet, we are the ones who end up at the emergency room, are admitted to the hospital, and find we are in for the fight of our lives when just yesterday we felt fine and were looking forward to decades more active life.

Do you realize that 25% of Americans are taking mood-altering drugs for anxiety or depression? The problem is widespread – you may feel ok, but I’m sure you know someone who does not feel ok. They are hurting, worried, sad, or frightened.

It is at those times that we feel overwhelmed. Have you ever felt overwhelmed? Are you overwhelmed today?

And yet…we see a few people around us who never seem overwhelmed. There are people around us that seem happy and relaxed all the time, never rushed, never looking drained, never arriving with mis-matched clothing because they simply didn’t have time to find the right clothes. These people seem to have it all together. What are they doing differently? What secrets have they found that we can’t find?

Well, I’d like to say that they are simply better at hiding that overwhelming feeling from us, and that is true of many people – but the reality is that there are some people who are not overwhelmed. Some of those people are that way because they are totally selfish – these people are usually single, living alone, and lead a simple life in which they control almost everything. They have a simple life because they have no life – no significant interactions with others, tiny apartments, few friends. But there are not many of these people.

But there are people who manage to live full and rich lives with many friends, accomplishing great things, involving themselves in other people’s lives, and yet they manage to keep things sane, keep things altogether, and keep from being overwhelmed. How do they do it?

Even Jesus and the disciples were overwhelmed. One day, Jesus felt the crowds were getting a bit out of hand – the Gospel says that the group did not even have time to eat. So Jesus tells them that it is time to get away – to go to a deserted spot where they can rest. It is time for a vacation.

Have you ever taken a vacation and then felt you needed to have a vacation to rest from your vacation? Two weeks at Myrtle Beach, doing everything, seeing shows, playing miniature golf, shopping, hitting this attraction and that attraction, doing everything, and driving back on Sunday, getting home late in the evening, unpacking and throwing clothes into the washer and then crashing, only to get up Monday morning at 6 am and head to work?

That was what happened to Jesus and the disciples. Before they could even get to the deserted spot, the paparazzi had spotted them, tracking their boat from shore, and followed on foot, arriving even before the boatload arrived. And Jesus and the disciples began to work once again. For you see, Jesus and the disciples were not ministering in a place that had crowds. The crowds were there because Jesus and the disciples were ministering there. Wherever Jesus and the disciples went, there would be crowds, because Jesus and the disciples would be there.

But the principle was sound to go on vacation. Perhaps It is just our implementation of it that is not sound. When we go on vacation, we take our built-in need to do things, and we work hard on our vacations. If we try to rest, someone who has come along – probably a child – utters those demonic words “I’m bored” and we feel the need to do something.

But, you see, there is our problem. Wherever you go, there you are.

Where ever we go, that’s where we are. Just like how the crowds followed Jesus because it was Jesus who created the crowds, our stresses follow us, for we are the cause of our stresses.

We think that vacations are to get away from the stress of our lives, but what we don’t realize is that we create almost all of the stress of our lives. We decide we need to shop, we decide we need to respond to others, we decide that we need to spend money which causes this or that bill to come due. We decided that we would have this or that home and hence we have that particular size house payment. And for many diseases that strike us down, we decided that we would smoke or drink or eat pork or soda pop and then we wonder why we have lung cancer or diabetes or heart disease or liver problems.

Where ever we go, that’s where we are.

When you go on vacation, do you actually relax? Or do you find yourself bored?

Here are several ideas to keep you from being overwhelmed.

First, military strategists will tell us that the key which keeps a force from being overwhelmed is to always keep a reserve, extra forces that can be put into play if a surprise occurs. If a force of ten thousand people are fighting an enemy, the commander calls for help when his reserves are down to about three thousand, because he wants to keep those three thousand spare troops ready to respond to a surprise by the enemy.

We need to do the same thing with our lives. We need to keep three hours a day in reserve. Because we are not comfortable “doing nothing”, we don’t keep reserve time available. If we find ourselves with three hours to spare, most of us must “do something”. We remove that reserve time immediately and fill it with something. Worse yet, we even look ahead on our schedule and fill in any blank spaces. “Oh good, I’ve got an hour on Friday afternoon between 5 and 6 pm, so I’ll mow then.” And then when Friday afternoon arrives, Susie calls and needs a ride, so the stress level builds because you had planned to mow during that time.

Have you ever considered planning your life so you have a spare three hours a day that are unplanned, time in which you can simply sit and talk with God if nothing urgent comes up?

Or are you so uncomfortable when it’s just you and God in the room that you must fuss around, doing something so that you won’t have to talk with God?

Have you ever just scheduled time with God alone, to sit and talk? Or is it more important to dust off the windowsills?

You see, we find work for us to do to keep us from talking with God. Maybe we try to squeeze in conversations with God while we drive between appointments. Maybe we try to talk with God a bit while we vacuum. Maybe we try to speak a bit with God while we mow the lawn. But would you treat any other person that way, telling them – “I can only talk with you while I vacuum, while I drive, while I mow.” Imagine if you talked to your wife or husband that way!

Have you ever considered that it doesn’t really matter if the dust is thick on the windowsills? Have you ever considered that one of those appointments really isn’t that important? Have you ever thought that perhaps someone else could mow that lawn – maybe the boy down the street who needs $30 a week.

There is a saying in business: Work expands to fill the time allotted. We have a tendency to try to fill every minute with something to do, even if it is just watching television, because we are scared to death of being alone with ourselves and God. And this comes at an early age – look at a child or a teenager and ask them to sit alone, doing nothing except silently talking with God, for five minutes or “gasp!” a half an hour.

If you want to avoid being overwhelmed, give yourself reserve time. Plan your day with three hours unscheduled time. Put in time for God.

The second key to avoid being overwhelmed is to have plenty of help available for yourself. Most people have certain jobs which they do. They are the person who plans the meals. They are the person who drives the children. They are the person who cleans the gutters. They are the person who handles the customer complaints.

Whatever your role at work, at home, in the church, a key to keep from being overwhelmed is to train other people to do your job. How many of you have avoided vacations because you are the only person who does your job and when you return you know you’ll have two weeks of extra work stacked up on your desk? How many of you can’t skip out on a Friday afternoon because if you don’t do it, it won’t get done? How many of you actually believe that you are vital for the proper functioning of your workplace, your home, your church?

Jesus trained his disciples to replace Him on earth. Have you done the same? Have you trained your replacement?

Get real, folks! If you think you are irreplaceable, you have a really big ego problem. Although you are unique and very, very valuable, every single thing you do could be replaced with someone else, if properly trained. But you have not trained someone because you really like what you are doing. And you have not trained someone because it would take time and effort to train someone and you are too lazy to find and train that person with the time and influence you have. And most of all, you have not trained someone because you are afraid that you would be replaced.

But as long as you do not train a replacement, you will not be promoted. As long as you don’t train a replacement, you will be overworked. As long as you don’t train a replacement, you will be stuck doing exactly what you are doing, feeling overwhelmed.

Look at the church. Do you realize that there are only four things that I do which I cannot delegate to someone else in the church? Anyone in this church can visit and contact visitors – and there are many people who can do it better than I can and more effectively. Anyone in this church can visit the sick in the hospital and many can spend more time and have better conversations that I can. Anyone in this church can read scripture and many can do it as well as I can. Anyone in this church can lead singing and several can do it better than I can. With a single Saturday’s training, anyone passed by Rosemary’s committee can preach a sermon, and we have about a half-dozen people who have done so.

The only four things which our United Methodist church says that only I can do are to baptize people, bless Communion, perform weddings, and perform funerals. And given a few days notice, Mary Ellen Finegan could find a replacement for me for those functions. Everything else that I do is something you could learn to do. Let me know what you’d like to do that I do – I’d love to train four of you to do each thing I do.

At a previous church I pastured, I did everything on Sunday mornings. I greeted people, I read the scripture, I preached, I played the piano, and I sang solos. It was a struggle - the church was struggling. Part of the measure of a good church, you see, is when people are willing to get involved and share the joy of doing. And another part of a good church is when everyone realizes that there are multiple people who can do the same work, and so the duties get passed around from week to week, from person to person. This way, people don’t get overwhelmed.

Have you trained your replacement? Have you trained another to do what you used to love doing, but now wears you down because you are constantly doing it?

Our third way to avoid being overwhelmed is to realize that some jobs simply don’t need to be done. Just don’t do it. Jesus did not ask His disciples to build tents for the people, although it would likely become very chilly that night. He knew that the people would figure it out themselves. In the same way, consider this: what do you do in your life that takes up your time that simply doesn’t need to be done?

For most of us, watching television or playing Facebook games is something we could stop doing. For most of us, cleaning parts of our house could be done half as often and no one would notice. If you live alone, have you thought about vacuuming once a month instead of once a week? Have you thought about cutting your grass every ten days instead of every week? Have you thought about doing laundry once a week instead of three times a week? Have you thought about reconciling your bank statements every quarter instead of monthly?

There are habits which we have made in our lives which need changed from time to time. Perhaps when there were children at home it was necessary to vacuum weekly or even daily. But now that it is just you, look at everything you do and decide if it is really necessary to do it so often.

And maybe it just doesn’t need done. How many of you have doctor’s or dentist's appointments that don’t really need to happen? My wife was called up by her eye doctor’s office who told her that it was time for a cataract checkup. She knows herself well enough to know that she didn’t need a doctor to tell her that she didn't have any cataracts, and she canceled the appointment. The same goes for oil changes – most cars today need oil changes every five or even seven thousand miles, not every three thousand miles as the oil change places recommend.

And some things simply aren’t needed at all. We limited our children to one activity at a time – Swim team or dance, Boy Scouts or Civil Air Patrol. Too many activities overwhelm us and so we didn’t do it.

Cut back or don’t do is one answer to being overwhelmed. If you only do one important thing a day, that’s 365 important things a year – and you will be far ahead of everyone else. Don’t let the things that don’t really need doing overwhelm the very few important things.

And the fourth key to being overwhelmed is shown by the disciples and Jesus once again. The disciples had no idea how to feed the five thousand – but Jesus could. And so, the final answer to being overwhelmed is to rely upon God to fix things. The disciples were asked to blindly bring the bread and the fish to Jesus and let Him handle things. And when they trusted Him to handle it, five thousand people were fed and were filled. They let God do it.

What is overwhelming you?

What are your most pressing problems?

Hand them over to Christ and let Him solve the problem for you. As long as you hold onto the problems, you are denying God permission to work on them, like a child who is afraid to let the parent wash the scrape on the child’s knee. But God knows how to fix those problems and if you will truly surrender the problems to God, then God can work in your life. Truly surrender the problems – don’t give them to God and take them back again. Ask God to stand by you and handle the problem.

Take a blank piece of paper in your bulletin and put your overwhelming problems on that paper. Crumple up that paper and put it in the wastebaskets. After you have done that, if you want to take back the problems, you can walk back to the wastebasket and take them back, but my suggestion is that you just leave them there for God to handle. Ask God to handle those problems - and leave them there so you won't be overwhelmed.