Somebody said it at the funeral, kindly, with a hand on your arm: God won’t give you more than you can handle. In the first month after, you hear it again in your own head, at night, and now it sounds like a test you are failing, because this is more than you can handle. No verse in the Bible says that sentence. Paul wrote that he was once pressed “above strength,” so far that he despaired of life, and the Bible kept his words.
Where the sentence started
People who say it are reaching for a real verse.
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)
The verse does set a limit, “above that ye are able,” and it does promise that you will be able to bear it. The limit is on temptation, and the promise includes a door, “a way to escape.” In verses 6 to 10 Paul has just walked the Corinthians through the old warnings from the wilderness, the ways Israel was pulled into sin on the road out of Egypt. “Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall,” Paul says in verse 12, and right after the promise, “flee from idolatry.” He is talking about the pull to do wrong.
Somewhere between Corinth and the funeral home, the sentence changed. Tempted became given, which turns a pull you can resist into a load somebody hands you. And the back half of the verse fell off, the half with the way of escape in it.
Paul past his strength
The same Paul wrote this, later, to the same church.
For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life:
2 Corinthians 1:8 (KJV)
The World English Bible puts it as “weighed down exceedingly, beyond our power.” Paul says plainly that he went past what he could carry. He did find a meaning in it for his own case: “we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead,” and he writes that God “delivered us from so great a death.” That was Paul’s word about Paul’s trouble. A few chapters on, he describes his ordinary days in 4:8 as “perplexed, but not in despair,” using “despair,” the word he had used of Asia, and saying this time that he was not in it. It was the same Paul who wrote “I can do all things through Christ” about being held in hunger and in plenty, and he wrote this too.
The Bible lets you say that this is more than you have. You can say so to God, and you will be using words an apostle wrote down first.
Songs that do not turn
Some of the psalms say it too. Psalm 88 is given “to the chief Musician” in its heading and begins, “O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee.” It keeps praying from the first line to the last, and it ends here:
Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.
Psalm 88:18 (KJV)
The psalm never turns, and it is still in the book. Lamentations is five chapters of grief over a ruined city, and its best-known hope, “his compassions fail not. They are new every morning,” sits in the middle of the sorrow, in 3:22-23. And in John 11:35, outside Bethany, on his way to the grave of a friend he was about to call out of it, “Jesus wept.”
I have had a first month myself.
If you have come to the end of what you have and you are thinking about not going on, please call or text 988 in the United States and Canada, or call 911 if you are in danger right now. Anywhere else, call your local emergency number. Then come back to this when you can.
For the people standing beside them
The ones who say the sentence mean well, and they are looking for words in a room where no sentence is enough. It quiets the room. It also hands the grieving person a second job, to prove they are equal to the first one.
There is a better thing to do, and it costs more. The people beside a grieving friend can say the name of the person who died, out loud, without changing the subject. Then they can pick a date well past the point where everyone else stops calling, put it on the calendar, and on that day call or write and offer one particular thing, a meal or a ride, that asks the grieving person to prove nothing. For the friend on the other end of that call, it may be the first thing in months that lets them be as tired as they are.