Working Through Feeling Overwhelmed

Hi everyone, Mark DeJesus here, and I'm looking forward to talking to you about something that I think we all can relate to. And if you don't relate to this, I don't know what to tell you, because the subject of overwhelm is something I believe impacts so many of us in so many different ways.

And through my one-on-one work with people and interactions, I get the sense many people are experiencing these feelings of overwhelm. I did a previous video this week about catastrophic thinking; you definitely want to check that out because I was mapping out how catastrophic thinking affects us, and I got a lot of feedback from people, so that was very, very helpful. And I was... I was marinating on the subject. I felt like I wanted to do another aspect of the journey of our thinking and look at it from the place of overwhelm.

You're feeling overwhelmed. A lot of people are feeling overwhelmed. Maybe there's financial factors, there's family factors, there's stuff with kids in marriage, there's work, there's church, there's life, there's relationships. Then there's your own personal world: there's the thoughts you struggle with. Maybe you have some mental health battles you're becoming aware of. Maybe you've been feeling more depressed lately. Maybe you've been having more anxiety or obsessive kind of tendencies kicking up. Maybe you feel yourself going to addictions, and the addictions are ramping up in your life. And then you hit this place of overwhelm.

And what I notice is, for many people, they can hit these sudden feelings of overwhelm. Now, overwhelm is not just something that just arrives out of nowhere, although we do have those traumatic moments for sure, where it's very unexpected, very, um, something that we didn't see coming, see coming our way. But there's also a factor of overwhelm where stuff is happening over a period of time, and we're not always aware of the signals, and then it hits like a red light.

You know, when you drive in most places, you have stop lights, right? And you have a green light, a red light, right? Well, you don't have just green and red; you also have yellow. And yellow is a transition signal between green and red that says, "Hey, you need to pay attention to this." And we typically in life don't pay attention until it's a red light. And red light meaning we're hitting overwhelm, we're hitting things like burnout, we're hitting things like our just our capacity seems drained. And it can often let us know we've not been paying attention to the yellow light signals, because the yellow light is a great buffer that says, "Hey, just slow things down, be aware of something." And we don't tend to look at that; we kind of live our certain ways, and the red light gets our attention.

So, what I'd like to do here in this broadcast is I'd like to sit down and talk with you as though we were having a session together, and I was speaking into your overwhelm. Now, whether my illustrations fit perfectly to exactly what you're going through, don't worry, because the overall principles can help all of us in what we're going through.

Because overwhelm brings a lot of things. Overwhelm is often expressed in things like, "I've hit my limit." You say things like, "I can't take it anymore." You find yourself saying that, "I'm done. I'm out. Can't handle this. I'm just overwhelmed." Then it can be fueled by catastrophic thinking. It can fuel catastrophic thinking for sure, which I talked about in another video. But in that overwhelm, you can feel very defeated, very exhausted, very burnt out, very overpowered by a circumstance, by a situation, by a thought pattern.

Many people working through their mental health battles, they feel incredibly overwhelmed, and they hit these limits. And people write to me saying, "I checked myself into a clinic. I checked myself into a mental health place, and then I felt bad for doing that because I'm a Christian, and why should I even do that?" They're hitting a place of overwhelm. They're hitting a place where they don't feel they know what to do. And usually at those moments, well, what it reveals is, it reveals there's a new level of equipping that we need; we just don't currently seem to have a connection to it.

I remember that many stages in my life feeling incredibly overwhelmed. If you've named the subject somewhere in my journey already, I've experienced overwhelm, whether it's mental health areas, whether it's relational areas, career, finances, family, it's, um, you, you name it: physical health issues, right? Well, I've had to learn how to apply what I'm giving to you here today, because for many of you, it could save your sanity. Because we get to these breaking points, because it's revealing some signals to the heart of some things that are needed. And we're now in red light. We didn't know what to do at yellow light, or maybe we didn't even see it, and now it's red lighting, and, "Ah!" right? And so then we feel bad that we're even in that place. We beat ourselves up, and none of that is productive and helpful.

Many say in their state of overwhelm, their mind is spinning; they can't seem to focus. You can't seem to even know what the next step is. And then we develop a 911 mentality. So we're calling out to our friends with a 9-1-1 mentality, right? And then that can wear them out over time, and then we get frustrated that they're not being there for us. And then we're beating ourselves up, "Why am I not better?" We're crying out to God in a 9-1-1 way. We're feeling like we're drowning, but we can't seem to connect to the lifeguard because we're flailing our arms and screaming, right?

Lifeguards say when they're rescuing people—I'm not a professional lifeguard, but I've heard people say—one of the biggest things you have to do is you have to keep them calm, find ways to calm them down, because otherwise they could drown and actually drown you by all their flailing and pulling and panicking. And so I found in my life, in our journey, the Christian world, we need—I mean, everybody needs this, but the body of Christ as believers—we need equipping. And what it means when we're feeling like we're drowning, to ground ourselves, to go, "Okay, what's next?" Because there is one step to take. There is one probably focused thing right now, and where you're at, but we can't find it because we're just flailing our arms and screaming.

And I had to be aware of that. I had very, very poor coping skills because most of the time in Christianity, we're just taught, "Just pray your prayer, read your Bible more, and just, you know, just get on with it. You'll be fine. Get over it." And, and, and it's like, "Wait, but this is a real struggle!" And just ignore it? Okay, all right. And then we just feel terrible that we're having these very difficult emotional, overwhelming kind of struggles. I'm not about that, but I'm also not about leaving you in quicksand to just sink and sink and sink. We've got to find our way through it, right?

That's why in a number of these videos, I title them "Working Through." So we're not going to ignore overwhelm. We're not going to just quickly dismiss it. We're going to work through it. And that's my goal in my heart, and that's the format of most of my videos: is working through a subject, seeing it, facing it, working through it, not dismissing it, not giving quick clichés. I'm not into that. Life is tough, it's challenging, it's difficult.

And so overwhelm jumps onto our problem and adds another layer. You're already growing through stuff that's difficult enough; you don't need overwhelm stacked on top of it now, making it even harder and even more challenging. You don't need that.

So, I, as your brother from another mother, but we have the same Father, is here to encourage you in that. I want you to be able to get some nurture out of this, because our overwhelm is revealing that we lack nurture. And nurture is one of the most powerful forces when we are in difficult times, because nurture brings comfort, and it brings a sense of recovery. You're going through a hard time; you need recovery. You need to build up resilience to get back in the game. You get punched in the face, it knocks you out, and you're like beating yourself up that you got knocked out, right? You don't need that. It happened. It's okay. Now what?

Well, nurture comes in to help heal, to settle, to ground you a bit. You can take a breath, get some comfort. It's not solving all your problems in one moment, because sometimes in our desperation, we go, "God, you, I need you!" We develop a lotto mentality with God. What's a lotto mentality? You know, I don't know if other countries call it the same thing, but here in the States, we have a lottery where you go in and you get some tickets and spend some money, and you hope that you get big money, right? Well, we do that with God. We kind of like, we do our version of scratching tickets or, you know, throwing up prayers of, "God, just solve all this!"

What nurture does is equip you to realize you have what it takes. God is with you, and this is more about you strengthening, healing, growing as you go through this. This isn't just about, "Let me get through this and just get it over with," because many times there are gold nuggets, there are jewels in these dark places that you're going through that cannot be discovered in just the good, pleasant, blessing kind of times that we want to stay in and live in. It's the resistance that actually forms you, and we're not equipped for resistance.

And I had a realization of that: "I have zero equipping for resistance." And so the invitation God brought to my heart was, "I want to take you to the daily gym of learning how to deal with resistance," because many times in my "rescue me" prayers, I was asking for God to alleviate me from discomfort. I was asking God to alleviate me from the difficult decisions, from the daily stepping into the discomfort and learning and growing. I just wanted to feel better, and I just wanted it to get easier. And then I was beating myself up why I wasn't breaking through, because I was like, "This should be easier!"

And then I had to learn nurture is what I need to bring the comfort and recovery, but also to build some resilience to my spiritual muscles, because I had spiritual atrophy. The muscles were there, but they hadn't been activated. And you as believers, many of you, you have the muscles; they've just not been activated. And so then in overwhelm, you spin out and, "Well, maybe I'm just not a good Christian," or, "Maybe I'm not even a Christian at all," or, "Maybe I'm just, you know, I'm not..." You just start beating yourself up. No, the muscle's there, the fruit of the Spirit's there, God is with you, the Holy Spirit's there. We have to learn how to activate it. When we look around, like, how many people really got equipped in that?

So, I find in this overwhelm, it's like you feel like you're getting buried underneath something. The problem gets magnified, and God starts to shrink, and it's very difficult to even connect to God. A common theme people say is, "I don't even know, I don't even know how to connect to God." Oh, wait, wait, these are the honest Christians. Okay, all those of you that, that you, you're still faking it, you don't struggle with this. You do, you, everything's just wonderful, and, and God just always, you're just amazing, and you don't have these problems, right? Right.

But I find I want to give you the good news of overwhelm. We know the bad news of overwhelm, right? It's dangerous in the sense that it doesn't allow you to focus, it doesn't empower you, it just leaves you in a feeling of drowning, right? So then you, you can't seem to fruitfully take steps.

I also find overwhelm is a gift in the sense that it's a signal that you've been redlighting for a while, and it is time to really start dealing with some stuff. And that frustrates a lot of Christians. "We may have to deal with stuff? I got things to do!" Overwhelm actually confronts our thinking patterns. It confronts our lifestyle. It confronts how we cope, how we deal with problems.

And what love does, the love of God—because this, this episode is really about the love of God—love is what you need in the midst of overwhelm. You don't need the three things you need to fix. You don't need 10 steps. Nope. What you need is, you need love.

Now, in order to get there, there's some things I want to recommend that you begin to start practicing in your life. But this is a decision you're going to have to make, because there's a fork in the road in our overwhelm. The fork in the road is one pathway says, "God, just get me out of this mess so I can go back to my life." If that's your mindset, you'll be frustrated. You'll go from overwhelmed to overwhelmed, overwhelmed to overwhelmed. Nothing will change. The same patterns will happen, and even if your situation changes, you're still bringing you into that situation, you know?

So if you hate your life and where you're at, and you beat yourself up all the time, and you're constantly drowning, and things in your situation change, you're still bringing that state of mind and all that pattern of thinking there anyways. But we think like if all our circumstances change, then we'll, we'll change and be better. And it's like, it's just not true. And sometimes we have to go through some rounds of experiencing that to realize it.

And so, so we, the one fork in the road says, "Just get me out of this." The other fork in the road is like, "Okay, I'm going to see this as a signal. Things need to change in my life." So when I found that my patterns of thinking were going into anxiety, constantly debilitating anxiety, and bouts of depression, I'd have panic attacks, obsessive compulsive thinking that would just own me. This wasn't like, I, I spent a lot of time, "God, rescue me! God, rescue me!" just kind of throwing flares up, throwing flares up, right?

And what I realized is, I've got to take a different posture, because this requires renovation. This is deeper work. This is, I've got to recognize areas of my life that need changing. This isn't about just one little thought that I need to fix. This is about how I see God, how I see myself, how I do relationships. And so that's the, that's the fork in the road where I made that decision.

And many of you in your overwhelm, you're at a place of decision. What do you want? Do you just want to be comfortable? Because you're going to really get frustrated. You'll stay in this. You'll, you'll stay in the shallow end. You'll kind of keep going, and yellow lights will happen all the time, and you'll just keep going. And then you'll have panic when the red light comes, and you'll call your pastor, right? We all do that. We've all been there. "Mark, I need, I need help today! Uh, this is it!" Right? It's like, we, we only know how to deal in those kind of measures, instead of, "Okay, there's been a yellow light for a while, and I need to learn how to make adjustments, because there's things I don't know, there's things I don't carry, there's things I don't have connection to that I need to learn."

And so I'm going to give you the thing that I say in all my teachings, pretty much, is we're going to need a divine pause. If we're going to break through overwhelm, if we're going to work through this, we have to have a pause. Now, what does that look like? Well, I think there's an overall pause in life. It's paused throughout the day. It's, we need to create some space to start paying attention, because when we live in a life where you are constantly at a heavy speed, and you have your engines revved up, the engines get really loud, so you can't hear anything else.

And for many of us, that's how we live. You live at such a rate that you can't, there's noise so much that you can't hear anything else. So there might be other problems with the engine, there might be other check engine lights, whatever, but you've got that engine so loud, blasted, and, and you've got the pedal down to the floor, and that's your way of living. Well, you can't, you can't hear the signals you need to hear.

And then this is, this is mainly why Christians say, "I can't hear God." The 101 reason why we can't hear God is simply because your, your, your life is loud. Your life responds to the loud voices, the loud noises. And so those loud voices are driven living, performance living, achievement living, fear, fear kind of living, pressure, all that kind of stuff. Those voices are very loud.

Now, God isn't putting performance pressure on you. God isn't anxious. God isn't fearful. So he's not putting those pressures on you. He's not putting those thought patterns on you. He's speaking a totally different frequency. He's speaking the language of love, but we can't hear it because we're not in a place of even connecting to what love is.

So in many ways, in my overwhelm, I speak the language of English, but if someone came to me with the very thing that I need—I mean, exactly what I need, what I need to hear, what I need to know, the instructions I need—but they're speaking in Mandarin, I have no idea what they just said. And this is one of the things why the Christian life is not an event, it's a journey. Is that we are spending the rest of our lives learning a new language that is very, at first, very difficult to understand. It almost feels too good to be true that God would love us this much, that he would pay this much for us, that he has so much grace towards us, that there's so much freedom in Christ.

This takes time to learn, because for many, there's a lot of resistance. It's unfamiliar. You're very unfamiliar to what a good father is. You're very unfamiliar to know what is it, we're the family of God. What does it mean when we all come from such dysfunctional families? What does it mean to have a loving family? Because this is all we know. So when the beauty of God's language arrives to us, we get frustrated because we can't hear it or understand it.

So I've got to take a step back. I've got to pause and realize I need a whole new language. I need to learn not the language of performance and trying to earn love and living under all this yoke that we live under in Christianity. We're still trying to do everything just right. We're still living by the law. We just don't realize it. We sometimes don't admit it. We're still living by the spirit of the law with a repackaged Christianity on top of it, which Paul confronted in Galatians. He says, "You guys are doing a real spiritual drift here. You started in faith, and you went back to, 'I gotta make sure I follow these holidays. I gotta do these things like, make sure how many, how often should I? Okay, three times a day.'" He's like, "Uh, you're going back to the rigidity of your formulas, and now you, your focus is fitting the formulas to feel better about your relationship with God." No, no, no, no, no. This is about what he did for you. This is about his ways working, right?

So, so when I pause, one of the things I start to realize is, why am I going so fast? For many people, they cannot sit down and just be with themselves. You live in a performance-driven lifestyle. It's the only way you know how to cope. So slowing down and pausing seems frightening. But what you have to come to terms with in your overwhelm, you are carrying weights upon you that were not meant to be carried by you. You can give me 100 reasons why, but God's not putting that pressure on you.

So think of it this way: you're crying out for God to rescue you based on a pressure God's not even putting on you. I hope this is helping you already, 'cause I know it's helping me. You are crying out to God to rescue you based on a pressure he's not put on you. "God, I'm trying to pray and get all these things, and why aren't you?" And God said, "Chill out. I didn't send my son to die to then spin you out all day in your performance." God help us.

But we are living in a hypnotic trance of busyness, so that overwhelm hits us, and we can't stop our thinking. Because it's like, you ever seen those little toys as a kid that you wrap a string around it? I know everybody's in their sophisticated video games and, and tablets and things like that. We don't even remember some of these basic toys. This little silly little top, and it'd have a string wrapped around it, and you'd fling the string, and it would give it just all this, would you call it, inertia or motion, movement, to just, and that thing would spin and just kind of spin like a top, just, right? You'd watch it. And for many, that's how you are, and you're constantly pulling the string of that, right?

So when you stop, like you let the string go, "Okay, that's it. I'm not going to do anymore," it's still spinning. That's you trying to stop and slow down. You're still spinning, and it takes time to let that thing stop. And what happens when that little top, little spinny thingy stops? It, it falls over. And that's what we do. And that's where God goes, "This is great! Now we can really deal with issues of the heart." And we want God to meet us in our crazy busyness and our striving. And I can't see what's going on in the issues of the heart. Quite frankly, we don't have any time for it. "I got time for this? Time for what? I go to a counselor? Like, what?" Like all these things that we say are revealing we don't know how to tune in to what's important. And the overwhelm is saying, "It's time to slow down."

Now, you will never slow down unless you make the decision at the fork in the road to say, "I want to live a life of total, I want to have a meaningful relationship with God. I have a meaningful relationship with my family. I want my mental state to grow healthier and healthier. I want to be emotionally available, that when my neighbor or those around me need a genuine moment of my love, I'm not like a complete drainage, and I just zoom past them. Nor do I want to get sucked into a vortex of just burnout trying to help everybody. I want to be mindful of who I, I need to help, and, and who is it, it's not my, it's not my, it's not what God's saying for me to step in and into that." We don't even know the difference in Christianity. We just do everything. "We gotta be like Jesus and help others." There's a lot of times Jesus walked away. There's a lot of times Jesus didn't do what people asked him, because he had the margin and the space to tune into the heart of the Father.

And what it does, it causes us to lose control, because we have control mechanisms underneath our constant business and our overwhelm. We have control problems. Not you, everybody else. I'm talking about other people, not you. Other people. You don't have control issues, just other people. These control issues drive overwhelm because we want to feel that we're in control.

Now, what fuels those control issues? And this gets to the heart of healing overwhelm: your expectations. In the place of overwhelm, it is a, it is a window into why we do the things that we do: our faulty coping patterns, our control issues, our expectations. We put heavy expectations, and they add a lot of pressure. If we look at our expectations, are they a yoke of burden, or are they a yoke of freedom? Because in Christ, we have choices. Do we take on his yoke, which adds more freedom? Not just freedom from the bondage of sin, freedom to live and move and have your being, freedom to make decisions, freedom to learn and grow, freedom to not be bogged down by, "Oh my goodness, I gotta make the right decision at every turn." It's like just learning to live, and in the learning, God is with you. And, and learning to connect to that freedom, boy, that freedom is, it's, it's like it feels too good to be true at first, especially to the performer, because the performer is used that all the weight of the world is on their shoulders, and it's to be, it's completely up to me, and I gotta do this, and all the weight of the world is on my life.

And take a second to have a drink. If these materials are a blessing to your life, go to markdejesus.com, click on the donate button, and that will really help us to be able to produce materials that are encouraging for those who want to experience true healing and freedom in their life.

Expectation. So, we're going to cover three areas here. The first is, you have intense pressure of expectation on yourself. Overwhelm often reveals how much we don't like ourselves, how much pressure we put on ourselves. We listen to the inner critic all day, which is nagging, nagging, nagging, telling us, "You should have, you should have, you should have, you should have. Why don't you do this better? Never enough, never enough, never enough, never enough. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Gotta fix this, fix this, fix this, fix this. Edit this, edit this, edit this, edit this, edit this, edit this." You see how I'm saying this repetitively, repetitively, repetitively? Because if I keep doing this, doing just doing this, it'll drive anyone crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. Are you feeling crazy yet?

That's why I say to people, "If I was to step into your mind, I would have to call Child Protective Services," because you listen to abusive thoughts all day long, and we tolerate it. And we can throw Christian-ese over it, ignore it, stay busy, maybe help a lot of people, but just ignore that we are incredibly hard on ourselves, incredibly hostile. You treat yourself as like a terrorist with a hostage.

And this is why I spend so much time, and if you, if you're recognizing this, there's two resources I want to recommend to you. One is the resource "God Loves Me and I Love Myself." This is, this was a game changer for my life, for me personally. This book is a really out of it. If you read the book and go, "Wow, it really helps me! Did you read my mail, Mark?" No, this is me. And then I found so many in the world relate to this as well. And "The Heart Healing Journey," because right in the midst of "The Heart Healing Journey," I talk about this process that I'm leading you through today, and, and I expand on it more. Is the, the, these, these, these moments of beating ourselves up, feeling overwhelmed, all that stuff, it's revealing you're incredibly hard on yourself.

And so you want God to change your circumstance. You want him to change the thing that you're going through, because if, if this got changed, things will be better. And God's going, "I actually want to change how you see yourself." And that's what I want to encourage in your life and in your journey. It's time that we learn to see ourselves through the language of love. Your overwhelm is poking at issues like self-hatred, self-rejection, unworthiness, perfectionism. Part of why you can't sit still is you can't even look at yourself in the mirror. You can't even be with yourself because you cannot stand yourself.

Now, that's okay, because most people struggle with that; they just ignore it with the overwhelm of pressure. In what we expect from ourselves needs adjustment, because that's what's making you angry, that's what's making you stressed: your expectations, how what you expect of yourself.

Which then lends into what you expect of others. Because for many of you, you're putting an expectation of people to be something for you that, a) they really can't just be, and b) it's a really a place God needs to fill. But you're frustrated with your relationship with God too, so you go there, and you're like, you're angry there too. And then you go back to people, and you're just irritated with them, and irritated with they don't meet your needs. And you have, you have this need to be understood, right?

And so then in your trial and your suffering, you, you over-explain yourself, and you share things. One of the things I tell people in my coaching work is, no matter how much you've been through, when you get help, don't feel the need that you have to get your full story out, or else you can't get helped. I, I've, you say, "Hey Mark, how do you know that?" Because that was a breakthrough for me, because I felt like, "Where do I even start?" And it's like, that's not how it works. That's how God works with us. That's not how help works with us. It's layer by layer.

And so, but that comes out of the pressure we have on people. "Why can't people be better?" Listen, I, I realize people are not always the greatest friends. They're not always there for it. Most people are just thinking about themselves. They're not thinking negatively about you; they're just thinking about themselves. They got enough problems they're dealing with, and they're not, they're not freed up. You see, when you learn to love yourself the way God loves you, it frees you up to look around and pay attention. It doesn't get you lost in other people, because many in performance-driven living, they're like, "Oh, just serving others, just serving others, loving others." Like, "Hey, how are you doing?" "Oh, don't worry about me." It's like, "Okay, all right, all right." We just, we live in, we live in this performance hypnosis. When you love yourself the way that God loves you, it actually frees you up to love other people powerfully.

So, pressure on yourself, your expectations. Love will adjust that. Pressure on other people. And then you have pressure on God. Now, there's a couple things that happen in this overwhelm. We go, "God, help me up there!" We treat God as he's way up there in the stratosphere, and we're way down here. So we're praying a God up there, "Come down here!" That's, that's kind of leaning towards the Old Testament posture of like, "God, do something!" Where there's the new covenant of the New Testament is God with us. He's with me. Jesus said he'll never leave me nor forsake me. I have a hard-wired connection to the Father right now.

Now, what makes it difficult is, in the overwhelm, you're flailing, so you can't connect. And you have to realize that I can't connect to the Father, not, not because there's something wrong with me or something wrong with God. It's, I'm not able right now to tune in the frequency, and I got to learn. And it's not about doing it good enough; it's about learning the language of love, because God's not hating on you right now. He's not condemning you. But, boy, your enemy is, your enemy is screaming with a megaphone right now. So I've got to learn to turn those dials down that I keep listening to all day, while learning to slow down, to turn in the language of love, while learning to be kind to myself, because what I need right now in overwhelm is I need nurture.

But we have this, "God, come down here!" instead of, "God, you're with me, even though I don't feel it and I can't connect to it." People say, "I can't feel God. I can't connect." Okay, so what? That, that's fine. That's normal. It's part of life. It's just a call to go deeper, right? Don't get into all your, "Well, I'm just not good enough, and I do, I have all these..." No, no, no, no, no. He loves you all the way through. It's just a foreign language that needs connection to. You can't hear God because the overwhelm and the inner critic are dominating the airwaves.

I'll give you an example in the Bible, in First Kings, was it First Kings 18, 19? Elijah, this like mammoth prophet, you know, with just absolute miraculous stuff happening, gets, um, gets punched by, by Jezebel with words, right? "So I'm gonna kill you!" He does this amazing thing. God shows up, fire from heaven, burns up the altar, prophet to Baal, take him all out. And he's like, "I'm out of here!" And Jezebel's like, "I'm gonna kill you!" Right? So he's exhausted. This, this moment has exhausted him, and now Jezebel's words have what we often call a Jezebelic effect on him, meaning it manipulates his emotions. It creates a fear factor, controls him, it overwhelms him, it wears him out. Then he spirals into self-pity.

Right in that state of overwhelm, Elijah, this amazing man of God, cannot hear God. And God does with him what you ask him to do, pointing with that, "What do you ask him to do?" Right? Don't you do that? You're overwhelmed. "God, come here! Show up! I can't take anyone! I don't know what to do! You show up!" Right? Meaning we yell, "I know, I gotta yell louder!" Right? Okay, so Elijah's there. He's barely even asking for God, and God shows up. His presence arrives the way we would all want, but he doesn't connect to it. It does nothing. God shows up, and it does nothing for Elijah.

This is what I want to get to, my brothers and sisters, in overwhelm: God showing up does nothing. "Mark, what are you saying?" What I'm telling you is the prayer that you want God to walk in your room or do something or go into your brain and just make your brain think differently, or for God to just kick your husband out of your house for you. I give you biblical precedent that God shows up, and it does nothing to change Elijah's state of mind.

God says, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" And I believe his statement to him was not, "What are you doing here in this geographic location?" I think it was twofold: "What are you doing here in this geographical location, and what are you doing here in this state of, this here being this state of mind?" Like, "Elijah, what are you doing? What's going on? You're a man of God!" And what does Elijah do? "I'm the only one left! I'm only here! Everyone's out to kill!" So he's overwhelmed, and the overwhelm distorts his perspective. So now he says, "I'm the only one." Now, that's a lie, because God says later, "Seven thousand people waiting for you." "Seven doubts? No, it's just me!" Right?

And in our overwhelm, we go, "I'm the only one who's going through this. I'm the only, only one who's battling this." Not true! Not true! You know what sometimes I wish I could do? I wish I could take all the people I've coached over the years and put them in some groups and go, "Y'all talk to each other!" Because, a) you have the same battles, and b) you think you're the only ones. I know that feeling. I thought that as a pastor on staff of a church, struggling with chronic OCD, didn't even know it was OCD, anxiety and panic attacks all the time. I'd spend time, I spent time in my office just throwing up with no appetite, just crying out to God and doing the begging for hours and getting nowhere, right?

Because I needed to be empowered in how to approach God in his love, to take what has already been done for me and activate God's wanting. He's not wanting to treat me like a slave. And that's a breakthrough that we need in our generations: is breaking out of slavery and into sonship. Because in sonship, the Father empowers you to activate and do it. Slaves need that constant reassurance. They never know where they stand. They're always doing, performing. They have no sense of identity, and they don't have a connection to the Father. And, and Paul said, "We are not slaves." That's no longer where we are. We're sons, we're daughters.

So I've got to learn. So I can't hear God because I've got to learn the frequency of that language: sonship, daughtership. I got to learn what it means to be a loved son or daughter. And the automatic answer people say is, "I don't know that. I don't know that. My father never told me he loved me," or, "I had this problem, had a narcissistic mother," "I had this problem, alcoholism." Did, okay, right? You just, you've just diagnosed what the issue is. Your references need healing.

So in the overwhelm, I'm here to tell you, you're not crazy, not out of your mind. There are patterns and things in your life that have contributed to where you're at: stuff in your upbringing, stuff in your generations, spiritual battles that are going on. Your responsibility is not to map all that and figure it all out. Your responsibility is to tune into what does it mean to be loved right now, so you can learn day by day by day what it means to heal and overcome.

"Well, got time for that?" Okay, that's impatience. And impatience immediately disconnects you from love. The moment we connect to impatience, it disconnects us, because love is patient, right? So my encouragement to you again, it's not that you need fixing, you need love. So we need to tune into love to see what does your heart really need. So I want to encourage you, allow love to help you face what you need to face. Love doesn't cause us to dis- to dissociate, to, and, and dissociation can happen in all kinds of different ways where we just don't face what's right in front of us. What we need is nurturing love to see what we need to see so we can take the next step. I talked about that in the catastrophic thinking, but I'm going to kind of take it from the sense of overwhelm here.

So here's what I reckon, I'm going to give you a free coaching input right now. Okay, take what you're battling, take what you're going through, all right? Everything, everything, every problem, everything, and put it in a package. Okay, hold that there for a second.

Now, what I want you to think about is, I want you to think about somebody that you love dearly. Like, you just, when you see them, think about them, you tune into love for them. Most people, one of their children comes to mind, a spouse, a friend, relative, whatever. Who's that person that comes to mind for you? Okay, now I want you to take everything that you're going through, and I want you to place it into their body, place it in them. Okay? And they've just sat you down and shared all of it with you, and you are fully connected to your love for them. What would you say to them?

Now, what I guarantee you would not say is, you wouldn't just give them a verse and walk away, because you would know that's not love, and that's not you connecting to love. What would you say to them? You would probably see a lot of things like, "I'm sorry." You'd probably see a lot of things like, "Wow, my heart goes out to you." You'd probably ask some questions, right? Not judgmental questions like, "Are you reading your Bible enough?" It's more like, "So, you know, how does this make you feel? How does this...?" They want to, people who are great listeners, they ask questions that help you go a little further and just feel safe to get what you need out, right? Because that's what you need.

Now take that approach and apply it to yourself. And when I say that, people go, "Right!" Revealing how you see yourself. Did Jesus die on the cross so that we would live hating ourselves? People are so afraid, "Oh, loving, that's lovers of themselves." Uh, I, I've been told I shouldn't love myself. I get what they're saying, critics of that, because they're, they're the, the selfish, narcissistic, self-focused lovers of themselves. I have a whole article I've written on that. What does "lovers of themselves" mean? I wrote it out and documented it. That's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm talking about clearing up the error and, and being able to see yourself through the eyes of how God sees you, so you can live in the flow.

Because living with God is the flow through the Spirit. It's a flow. Being led by the Spirit is the flow. I want you to live in the flow. And for most of us, the flow is backed up with self-hatred, condemnation, beating ourselves up, self-rejection, unworthiness, "don't deserve love," "I shouldn't be loved," all this stuff that just gets in the way of God's gracious, unconditional love flowing through us.

So in this, you're, I want to encourage you to face what you need to face in love, though. Not blaming, not beating yourself up, in love. Because then it, "Okay, this is where I'm at. This is what's going on. Here's the facts. Here's what's in front of me." And you start now tuning into the language of love, which was the first stage. I talk about this in "The Heart Healing Journey," because I dedicate a few chapters to it. I process the importance of the life of the heart, but then I get in the middle of the book into how do you then posture yourself? And the first place is learning to experience God's love for you right now, where you're at. Not when you change, not when you get better, right now where you're at.

I have a simple practice that I call TULA, T-U-L-A: Total Unconditional Loving Acceptance. And I have people say this statement. They put their hand over their heart, and sometimes they close their eyes, sometimes they look in the mirror or whatever, and say this statement: "I totally, 100 percent, unconditionally, lovingly accept myself right where I'm at." And, and, and kind of be aware what comes to the surface when you say that. And a lot of people was like, "No, no!" Right? That's that perfectionistic mindset built on self-hatred. You're saying, "I have self-hatred," yet probably that's the resistance. So I'm just filling that place in my heart. "I totally, unconditionally, lovingly accept myself right where I'm at."

I accept that this is where I'm at. I accept it because when I accept it, I see it. "Well, Mark, if I accept it, that means I'm going to compromise and tolerate sin." No, no, no, no, no. It's not what I'm saying at all. If that's where you're going, we have some learning to do. Because when God receives me, I say yes to Jesus. Does God go, "Oh, all your sins, keep doing them. It's okay." That's in, uh, you know, nowhere in the Bible. That's in Second Nothing. That's not what it is. It's being fully present in the midst of it.

I, I embrace you're going through financial hardship. You, you embrace, "Okay, this is where I'm currently at, and I'm loved in the midst of it." You're going through a physical illness. You're going through, many people write to me about they're going through a disease, they're going through chronic health issues. I get it. Those things are very, very difficult and challenging. Well, you need loving acceptance to go, "Okay, this is where I'm at right now," because many of you are living in an expectation of yourself outside of being ill when you're truly ill. It does limit you in some ways.

Now, we're not going to make you a victim that you can't do anything. That's what we go into, "I can't do nothing. I can't." If that's the case, go into my "Break the Limits Off" teaching: victim thinking, self-pity, all that stuff. Break the limits off, get that stuff, go through it, right? It's not about that, but it's taking into consideration, "I'm in a tough season." And when I'm going through hell, I don't need to add more hell on top of it.

What Total Unconditional Loving Acceptance says is, "It's okay that I'm not okay right now." It doesn't change love. And by the way, stop putting pressure on yourself that you need to hear from God in some perfect way or feel and connect to him, and all you do is get more mad. All you do is just beat yourself up even more. It's like, "Right now I'm drowning, and I, goal number one is to stop flailing my arms to find, to find the life preserver." Okay? It's not about, "I gotta hurry and get back to shore." That's going to take time. If you're way out in the deep end, and waves have hit you, you just need to just grab the life preserver and take a deep breath, and you're going to slowly move towards back to shore. And you'll need to hear the instruction of the lifeguard who's going to say, "Hey, um, stop flailing so much. Just stay there. Just..." And you'll, you'll notice, "Oh my goodness, he's right here," or, "She's right here. I, I can, I can, they're giving me a helping hand." See, when you're drowning, you can't even see the help that's there for you. "Mark, I don't know. God is, nothing's working." I guess that's, that's the drowning. Can't see the help that's there. Now, in this place...

Of overwhelm, you need a safe safety within yourself to express what you're feeling and what you're going through without judgment. You're upset, you're mad, let it out. Let it out in the sense of expression. For some, they journal. For some, they got to talk it out. I'm probably more into the talking out. I need to express it. I need to share it. I verbally out loud if I'm upset, if I'm upset with God, upset with myself, or sit with a situation, I gotta let it out because I gotta see it. And and I want to help you with your emotions. I want to help you with what you're feeling.

Now, just because you're feeling it doesn't mean it's the truth. That's where a lot of culture gets off track right now, right? Because we feel it, we equate every feeling with truth. No, but you got to find your way. We find our way to truth. We get things out, and we learn to invite God into it, and we find our way towards truth. Remember, truth is a person. Jesus is the truth. So if we're going to find our way, we got to bring our feelings and our emotions in the expression to God, and then find our way to allow His nature to fill those areas. But it's only going to be through His love. It's not going to be through anger, pressure, and hurry up and impatience. Get it out in compassion. Don't dismiss it. Don't go, "I shouldn't be saying this stuff. I, I, I shouldn't." We were constantly shooting on ourselves. That's just that's just inflaming the accuser, okay?

So get back to the practice. So I'm expressing that, um, and I'm and I'm saying it's okay that I'm not okay. And then I want to engage the pillars of love. I talk about this all the time: patience and kindness. Patience is what love can handle. Kindness is what love gives, gives out. This is going to lead me into some breakthrough because patience goes, "It's going to take as long as it takes." Yeah, but I'm drowning. I'm down here. I'm going to get tucked ashore. Okay, we're going to get to shore. Just let go of the timeline. You're going to eventually get there. Instead, focus on just putting your hand on the life preserver. We're going to focus on that right now, okay? Take a deep breath. Take a moment.

And here's what I want to insert into your journey. I want to speak right into your journey. This is not about your fault, God's fault, somebody's fault. It's not about what you did wrong. It's not about what you're not doing that you should be doing. I'm going to enter into a new, a new thought. What if you're right where you need to be? Because there's some beautiful things here that are going to be healed and learned in the process. And this situation, this overwhelm, is bringing it out. It's bringing it out in high definition. It's bringing out in great clarity if you'll see it. And maybe it takes your brother in Christ to bring this out for you.

Patience says, "It'll take as long as it takes." Now, kindness is what love gives out. And what you need is you need to now engage the voice of kindness towards yourself. This is where the battle is because now we're going to punch the inner critic right in the face. Not you in the face. You are not the inner critic. It's speaking to you, but it's not you. We're going to insert a new language, and the language is kindness. So I want you to take what you're going through and apply unconditional loving acceptance. All right, it's okay. I'm at where I'm at. This will take as long as it takes because the more pressure I add, the longer I get stuck in this. When I take the pressure off, it allows me to more fruitfully walk through this.

And third, so we got unconditional loving acceptance, patience, and kindness. Kindness is the language of God towards you. It's His goodness. And if you ever interact with me in your problem, I could give you the best advice in the world, but what you will take away the most is if I was kind towards you. Because we don't remember necessarily what's being said. We remember how people made us feel. And that's what God wants you to connect to because He's speaking to you in the language of kindness. But in your overwhelm, you're listening to the language of pressure, fear, anxiety, self-hate, beating yourself up, right? Meanwhile, He's still speaking kindly. But I have to now tune my frequencies to learn what kindness is. What does kindness sound like?

Okay, go back to the illustration of your friend going through it. You're talking to your friend. What would you say to them? Well, I would assume your approach would be kind. And so in that frequency, we start to say, "What is love saying right now?" Because that's what God is doing. And God will often bring the just the one thing. You know what? Go ahead and make that phone call and get started with getting some help. You know what? Get that book. You know what? Talk with that friend. You know what? You need more rest. Focus right now in getting sleep. You have a God. I get no, no, don't at all these expectations. It's just one thing. And usually, when I walk people through these steps, they, they discover the one thing. It's not like super snazzy and sparkly because it's usually very fundamental, very basic. Getting more rest. Learn to rest in God. Learn to be loved. Learn to take your peace. Slow down. Take the pressure off. Those kind of things, right? Because that's what God's leading us back to constantly is the fundamentals.

So I pray that this will help you. Where is kindness and the goodness of God leading you to right now? Write it down. Document. Share with a friend who's trustworthy. If this resource is a blessing to your life and to your journey, go to markdejesus.com, click on the donate button. I pray that, um, you will be generous, but don't feel any pressure. Never do it out of pressure. But if it's adding value to your life in your journey, consider supporting. And there's many books you can take advantage of that what I talked about today can touch on. But my biggest takeaways would be, God loves me, and I love myself as well as the heart healing journey. If you realize, man, nurture is a problem for me, and I, I need to learn how to nurture, receive nurture, and comfort. And that regrouping, we have an audio course online available now that you can get, "Restoring the Power of Nurture." A link to it is in the show notes. You can, if you, if you can't find it there, just go to markdejesus.com and click on the courses button, and you'll see the nurture course there. Take advantage of that.

But I look forward to providing you with more future resources and just continuing to be a blessing to your life. May you continue to live healed and free in every way, shape, and form. Be loved. See you next time.

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Music]

You