2 Corinthians 1:8–9 (8)For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. (9)Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.(ESV)
Sometimes everything falls apart. There are moments when life bends. There are moments when it cracks. And then there are moments when the entire thing seems to come apart in your hands.
I know something about those moments. I spent five years living in the literal wreckage of my life after a wreck that should have killed me. In a lot of ways, I was stuck there long after the wreck itself was over. But that wasn’t where the story started.
I’d already spent nearly a decade struggling to walk because of a genetic condition that I didn’t know I had. A rib dislocated and could threaten to puncture a lung because I sneezed, coughed, sighed too deeply, or stretched a little too enthusiastically.
I lost my body while I was still young. Then, after years of fighting and incredible medical intervention, I finally got it back.
And just a few months later, the wreck happened.
I lost my mind shortly after getting my body back.
There are years of my life that simply didn’t go the way years are supposed to go. I never really got to experience what people call their physical prime. Now I’m middle-aged, looking backward at a road that took turns I could never have anticipated.
That road taught me a lot. It also caused me to miss lessons other people learned along a much more normal path.
There are things about ordinary life that I don’t understand particularly well because I didn’t get here ordinarily. And there are things I understand far too well because of the road I did take.
Paul understood something about that kind of breaking. He wrote that he was “utterly burdened beyond our strength.”
Read that again. Beyond our strength.
There’s a popular Christian saying that God will never give you more than you can handle. That isn’t what Paul said. Paul said there was a point where he couldn’t handle it.
Whatever happened in Asia was so severe that Paul says he despaired of life itself.
This is Paul. Apostle. Missionary. Church planter. Writer of much of the New Testament. And he reached a point where the weight was greater than his strength.
The Bible doesn’t hide that from us. Neither should we.
Sometimes everything falls apart because we made terrible decisions. Sometimes somebody else made terrible decisions. Sometimes circumstances simply tear through our lives without asking permission. Sometimes we can identify exactly what happened. Sometimes we spend years trying to understand it. But there comes a point where figuring out why the building collapsed is different from realizing that you’re currently sitting in the rubble.
And when you’re sitting in the rubble, pretending you’re still standing doesn’t help anybody.
There are moments when faith doesn’t sound like: “I’ve got this.”
Sometimes faith sounds like: “God, I don’t have this.”
Paul didn’t write that he discovered strength he never knew he possessed. He said the burden exceeded his strength.
That distinction matters because Christianity isn’t ultimately a story about discovering how powerful we are. It’s a story about discovering who God is when our strength runs out.
Paul says the experience taught them not to rely on themselves, “but on God who raises the dead.”
What an incredible description of God to use here. Not God who helps strong people become a little stronger. Not God who teaches successful people how to succeed even more.
God who raises the dead.
Paul felt like something had reached its end. God specializes in what happens after the end.
That doesn’t mean everything immediately gets better. It doesn’t mean every broken thing gets put back exactly where it was. It doesn’t mean the pain suddenly makes sense.
I can look backward now and see lessons that were being built into me through years I would never willingly choose to repeat. But I still can’t see everything they are building toward.
Maybe I never will. And maybe you can’t see what your own wreckage is building toward either.
That’s okay.
You don’t have to understand the whole story while you’re still standing in the middle of it. You don’t have to pretend the weight isn’t heavy. You don’t have to pretend you aren’t tired. You don’t have to pretend you haven’t broken.
Paul didn’t.
Sometimes the first thing that happens when everything falls apart is that we finally discover what we were never capable of holding together by ourselves.
The collapse isn’t necessarily the end of the story. But before we talk about rebuilding, restoration, or what comes next, there’s something we have to be willing to admit: Sometimes we fall apart.
And sometimes the most faithful thing we can say from the middle of the wreckage is simply: “God, this is beyond my strength.”
Fortunately, our hope was never supposed to rest on our strength. It rests on the God who raises the dead.
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