• Evaluate your sleep and eating habits—food and rest provide energy to work and think; everything will shut down if you don’t get enough.
• Next step in sequence—figure out the next small thing; you may have knowledge of all the things that need to be done, but right now you can only do one. Break it down to a small enough job that you can do it in the next hour.
• “Be still and know that I am God,” Psalm 46:10—God is bigger than whatever is overwhelming. Look to Him for help and rest in His knowledge of your limits.
• Learn from it—what could I do, train, change, or limit next time so that this does not happen again. Some things are caused by an act of God, but sometimes our own decisions are the cause of our hardship.
• Guard your responses—this is a time of testing and spiritual warfare; work hard to respond in a way that shows you love God and love others. Think about what you say. Look again at what you are writing. Pause. Then react biblically.

Opening Question

1. How does God use “overwhelmed” to grow us?
2. There is nothing that we can trust in other than God. It’s a spiritual tool not just a temporal circumstance.

Final Thoughts

• Take 10 minutes to do something kind for someone else.
• It might not seem like it, but people begin to avoid sharing with an overwhelmed person.
• Don’t be a martyr—being overwhelmed should not be a permanent state of being.
• What is God teaching you?