It is the fourth month. The casseroles stopped a long while back, the phone has gone quiet, and you are awake at an hour when nobody else is. Somewhere in there you hear it again, the sentence somebody said at the funeral. God won’t give you more than you can handle.
You are not failing a promise. Nobody put that sentence in the Bible. It behaves like God helps those who help themselves, which is also not there and also sounds like a verse.
The people saying it are not making it up
They have the words very nearly right. The New Living Translation prints “more than you can stand” at 1 Corinthians 10:13. The New International Version has beyond what you can bear, the New English Translation beyond what you are able to bear, the English Standard beyond your ability, and the New American Standard and Christian Standard beyond what you are able. And one more, the Tree of Life Version, prints beyond what you can handle exactly.
What moved is the subject.
There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.
1 Corinthians 10:13 (KJV)
Paul is writing about temptation, and the saying carried his clause across onto suffering. One word changed on the trip. Tempted became given, which turns a pull you are resisting into a load somebody hands you. And the back half of the verse fell off, which is the half with the escape in it.
Some translations read that noun differently. The New English Translation has trial, and so does the New American Bible, and the Greek carries both, so the argument about it is a real one.
The seven verses above it settle which sense Paul had in mind anyway: he has just listed what went wrong in the wilderness, and the list is idolatry, fornication, putting Christ to the test, and grumbling. And it matters less here than it looks like it should, because on either reading Paul is promising a way out of a particular pressure, and on neither reading is anybody weighing a grief and setting the limit.
Paul went past what he had
For we don’t desire to have you uninformed, brothers, concerning our affliction which happened to us in Asia: that we were weighed down exceedingly, beyond our power, so much that we despaired even of life.
2 Corinthians 1:8 (WEB)
Beyond our power. The King James puts the same phrase as above strength, and neither version softens it to above what he expected. The next verse names what he had in him: “Yes, we ourselves have had the sentence of death within ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead,” 2 Corinthians 1:9, World English Bible.
Sentence there means a verdict, and it is the one Paul says he was carrying.
Later in the same letter he writes in the present tense about the same life, pressed on every side and not crushed, perplexed and not driven to despair. That last verb is the one he used of Asia, and here he negates it. He is describing what the days are like, and not grading how Asia turned out.
They sang Psalm 88 out loud
Most of the laments turn somewhere. The writer complains, then remembers who he is talking to, and some light gets in before the end.
A few of them never get there. Psalm 88 is the darkest of those, and Psalm 39 finds its hope in the middle and still ends by asking God to look away, which is what the Hebrew says where the King James has spare me. The heading on Psalm 88 hands it to the chief musician, which means somebody set this one to music and meant it to be sung.
Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.
Psalm 88:18 (KJV)
No turn, no resolution, and whoever assembled the book left it in.
Nobody has that sentence
I have sat with people in their first month. I have had a first month.
I still do not have the sentence, and I cannot tell anybody why it is this much or why it is them. Paul gives a reason for his own case, and I am not willing to hand that to somebody else as the explanation for their particular week. It was his to say about his own life.
Romans 8:26 says the Spirit helps you pray when you no longer know what to ask for, which is an instruction written for people with nothing left to say. Lamentations puts its famous line about mercies new every morning three chapters into a book about a city in rubble. And in a place outside Bethany, with the dead man’s sister at his feet and the grave still ahead of him, Jesus wept.
If you have reached the end of what you have and the thought has come to you that you would rather not be here, please call or text 988. It reaches a crisis line in the United States and, since 2023, in Canada. There is a chat at 988lifeline.org, and 911 if you are in danger tonight. Outside those two countries, your local emergency number. Do that first. The rest of this will still be here.
For the people standing up
The ones who say it mean well, and they have about the length of a handshake to find something for a room that has become unbearable. That sentence does the job for the room. It also hands the person in the chair a second task on top of the first one, which is to be equal to this.
There is a better thing available and it costs more. Say the name of the person who died. Then pick a date well past the point where everybody else stops, write on that day, offer one particular thing, and let the answer be no.
Nobody in the Bible promises you can take this. Whoever assembled that book knew somebody would come along needing a page with no light on it, and they left it in, for a reader they would never meet.