1. Learning to Feel – Overwhelm

Note: These “Learning to Feel” blog entries are copied here from chapter 5 of my book, New in the Middle. I’ve included them here because they share the main defining moments in my life. Instead of a chronological timeline, I tell my stories in a new way—from the perspective of my emotions.

Learning to Feel

Many growing teachers and leaders have developed their own leadership timeline. By thoughtfully mapping out our educational and leadership experiences, we can all obtain a deeper understanding of just how much God has woven into us. Through timeline activities, we gain a new understanding of how our context shaped us and how the community tightly woven around us provided the specific help we needed at certain painful points along the way. 

With ease we can record the big events on our leadership timeline: graduation from high school (Wow—that was a long time ago!), our undergraduate degrees, and then any further studies or job training received. In constructing my own leadership timeline for a class, gratitude welled up in my heart while recalling and recording every single seminar or short-term training ever attended from high school times up until the present. Themes become apparent. Looking closely at my own leadership timeline, my destiny as an educator with a flare for the creative and unusual grew clear. Doing things the normal way—nope, not in my blood. 

Overwhelm

Immediately, the first emotion rolled in: waves and waves and waves of overwhelm. At this point in my journey, I felt overwhelmed most of the time. In a twisted way, it felt holy and good. Feeling overwhelmed made me feel like I really cared and willingly sacrificed my own comfort like a good Christian. Busy raising children and doing good things for God, this feeling represented my normal life. However, rather than riding the waves, I could barely tread water and had started slipping under the surface. Coloring and meditating on those waves made me tired. I couldn’t fight the waves much longer. Looking back through previous pieces of art, my eyes spotted waves all over the place, hidden in many different images. They have been with me for a long time, and God wanted me to start to pay attention to the state of overwhelm that these waves represented. 

Deeply connected to these waves hovered the fatalistic sense of “I can’t do it. I cannot handle my life or the jobs God has given me. It doesn’t matter how hard I try.” That rooted belief haunted most endeavors attempted. In fact, during an especially challenging chunk of life, I wasted years trying to convince God that homeschooling our children was just too hard. Interestingly while busy complaining and explaining my inabilities, accidentally, day by day, I did it! Looking back, it seems like maybe those years could have been more pleasant if they weren’t spent feeling overwhelmed and believing lies the whole time. 

Drawing my emotional timeline helped me identify this status of overwhelm and the inadvertently and faithfully tended thought patterns that had grown like a garden of weeds in my brain. It turns out that “I can’t do it” and “It is too much for me” are toxic thoughts deeply rooted in all of our minds. Dr. Caroline Leaf explains the negative power of these thoughts. They actually take up brain space, and unless we replace these thoughts with better, healthier ones, those toxic thoughts will only grow.² 

“Wait! Why am I being so hard on myself. Don’t I have a right to feel overwhelmed?? I live in India! India’s overwhelming, for goodness sake. We have five kids! Any homeschool mom with five kids should be entitled to feel overwhelmed now and then.”

But do any of us have that right? Do we want this state of mind? What if we accessed the power of free will to break mental habits, control our minds and access God’s power to “take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ?”(2 Cor. 10:5). My own twisted and distorted thoughts consistently affected my emotions. In some ways, I didn’t know how to live without this tension of feeling overwhelmed as part of my emotional make-up. If I started to relax, guilt rushed in and provided the following thoughts:“I should be doing something. I should be doing more. I’m not doing enough.”

Truth be told: I’m still working on this state of mind and can easily slip into feelings of being overwhelmed. I have not yet acquired the mind of Christ, but identifying the enemy is half the battle. I’m on the right path. I’d be blessed by a few companions on the trail. Do you want to come?

To read the whole story, continue to the next blog entry.

God has taught me much about living abundantly within the reality of my limitations. To learn more, check out my book on Amazon.

Endnotes

1. Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 41. 

2. Caroline Leaf, Switch on Your Brain: The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2013), 21.