God Will Only Give You What You Can Handle

“God will only give you what you can handle.”

I’ve heard it my whole life.

I may have even said it.

Listen to the Story

4:17

It sounds faithful. Strong. Steady.

Like something you offer when you don’t know what else to say.

But yesterday, after losing my girl of fourteen and a half years, those words landed differently.

If God only gives me what I can handle,

then why does this feel like too much?

Why does the silence in the house feel louder than any noise?

Why does my chest ache in that deep, familiar place where love and loss sit side by side?

Someone said it when my dad died.

Someone said it when I was trying to get sober and everything inside me felt like it was unraveling.

And now again.

And I keep turning that sentence over.

If God only gives me what I can handle, then He would not give me death to grieve. He would not allow addiction to take me to the edge of myself. He would not hand me losses that split me open in ways I did not know were possible.

I could not handle those things.

They broke me.

They brought me to my knees.

They stripped away every illusion that I was strong enough on my own.

Maybe that is the deeper truth.

Life gives us more than we can handle.

Grief gives us more than we can handle.

Love gives us more than we can handle.

And that is exactly where something sacred begins.

There is a verse about strength being made perfect in weakness. I used to want the strength part. I wanted to skip the weakness. I wanted to be capable and composed and faithful without the falling apart.

But the falling apart is where I have met Him.

On the bathroom floor.

In the middle of the night.

In the quiet after goodbye.

Losing her hurts because she was woven into my everyday life. Fourteen and a half years of early mornings, steady eyes, quiet companionship. She was there through chaos and healing and rebuilding. She watched me become who I am today.

Of course this feels unbearable.

Love always asks something of us.

To love deeply is to one day grieve deeply.

I would choose her again. Every single time.

So maybe the sentence we have been saying to each other needs to change.

Maybe it is not that God only gives us what we can handle.

Maybe it is that God gives us Himself when we cannot handle what life brings.

Maybe the breaking is not proof that we failed.

Maybe it is the place where surrender finally becomes real.

Today I am not strong.

Today I am grieving. Tender. Missing her in ways that feel almost physical.

And still, underneath the ache, there is something holding me.

Not my strength.

His.

And that feels more honest than any tidy phrase we offer each other in moments like this. 🤍