Part One on too muchness

By noon, my desk looked like my mind. There were pages with only a paragraph before I stopped. A notebook with half a prayer. A document that held a single sentence before I wandered somewhere else. Another reflection that began with hope, drifted into grief, stumbled into theology, and ended with me staring out the window while the cursor blinked patiently, waiting for someone who had left the room without ever standing up.

If you had walked into my office today, you might have thought I simply couldn’t decide what to write.

The truth is much gentler than that. There are seasons when life hands us more than one soul can comfortably carry at once.

There was the sorrow of a hurting world, where war seems determined to drown out every quieter song. There was concern for my dog asleep next to me, seeking comfort he could not explain. There was the weight of pastoral ministry, the conversations entrusted to me, the prayers that still need to be prayed, and the people whose stories I continue to carry into God’s presence. There was Scripture waiting to be opened.

None of these things competed with one another. They simply arrived all at once. That is what overwhelm often feels like.

We tend to imagine overwhelm as panic or chaos. Sometimes it is. But more often it is quieter. It is cognitive traffic. Too many meaningful thoughts arriving at the same intersection. The nervous system begins trying to honor everything equally until, eventually, it loses the ability to choose anything at all.

The result is rarely laziness. It is saturation. Like a sponge that has absorbed all the water it possibly can, the soul simply reaches capacity.

When that happens, we often become frustrated with ourselves. We tell ourselves we should be more productive, more disciplined, more focused. We interpret our scattered attention as failure.

I wonder if God sees something entirely different.

Grace and peace, 

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation