When Life Hits From Every Direction

There is a particular quality to this kind of overwhelm that is different from ordinary stress.

Ordinary stress is one thing that is hard.

This is different. This is when the hard things stack on top of each other without enough space between them for recovery.

The medical crisis arrives. Before it resolves, the caretaking crisis deepens. Before that stabilizes, the financial pressure increases. Before that lifts, someone you depended on dies. Before you grieve them, the house starts falling apart. Before you can address the house, the other property needs attention.

And you are one person. Standing outside looking up at rotting wood wondering how you got here — how a life that was built so carefully, loved so faithfully, tended so consistently — became something you cannot hold with the number of hands you have.

The specific cruelty of this kind of overwhelm is that each individual crisis, by itself, would be manageable. You have survived hard things before. You know how to carry a heavy season. You know how to pray and endure and wait for the breakthrough.

But when five heavy seasons arrive simultaneously — when every direction you turn is another demand, another loss, another thing requiring your attention and your strength and your resources — the coping strategies that work for one hard thing do not always scale to everything at once.

And you do not need someone to tell you to pray more or trust more or have more faith. You need someone to say: this is real, this is a lot, you are not failing, and there is a way through it.

This is me saying that.

I want to return to the moment outside the house.

God. I cannot handle this. You have to give me strength.

That prayer — raw, unstructured, two sentences spoken into the air by a woman looking at rotting wood — was one of the most spiritually significant moments in my recent life.

Not because it was eloquent. Because it was honest.

There is a prayer that we perform for the benefit of our own image — the prayer that demonstrates how much faith we have, how composed we are, how we know all the right words.

And then there is the prayer that comes out of a person who has run out of performance and is simply telling God the truth.

I cannot handle this.

That is not a failure of faith. That is faith.

Because faith is not the declaration that you can handle everything. Faith is the honest acknowledgment that you cannot — and the trust that God can.

He hears the cry. Not the composed prayer. Not the eloquent petition. The cry. The two-sentence, standing-outside-looking-at-rotting-wood, I-cannot-handle-this cry. That cry reaches Him.

And what follows the cry — in my experience and in Scripture — is not always an immediate fix.

Sometimes what follows the cry is clarity.

The clarity to see what you can hold and what you cannot. The clarity to let go of the house, the property, the furniture, the three-thousand-square-foot container — and move into something smaller where life is actually manageable.

The peace does not always come from the problem being solved. Sometimes the peace comes from deciding to stop holding what was never yours to hold alone.

Stop trying to hold everything.

This is the first and most important practical step. When everything is hitting at once, the instinct is to try harder — to find a way to hold the house and manage the caretaking and address the disrepair and handle both properties and keep everything together. That instinct will exhaust you before it helps you.

The question is not: how do I hold all of this? The question is: what on this list actually needs to be held by me? Some of it does. Some of it can be delegated. Some of it can be let go entirely. Some of it — like the house — needs to be released so that the energy spent holding it can be redirected to what actually matters.

Triage ruthlessly.

Triage is a medical term for sorting patients by urgency. You treat the most critical first. You stabilize what can be stabilized. You accept that not everything can be addressed simultaneously. When life is hitting from every direction, you need to triage.

What is most urgent? What will cause irreversible damage if not addressed immediately? What can wait? What can someone else handle? What can be released entirely? You are not failing because you cannot address everything at once. You are being wise when you stop trying to.

Name every single thing that is hitting.

Write it down. All of it. The medical situation. The caretaking demands. The property. The financial pressure. The loss of Diego. The grief of the house. The estrangements. The isolation. Write every single one.

Not to overwhelm yourself further — but because unnamed weight is weight you cannot assess. When you can see the full list — when it exists outside your body on a piece of paper — you can begin to sort it. You can see what is yours. What belongs to God. What belongs to someone else. What can be released.

Make the cry.

Out loud. Specifically. God, I cannot handle this. You have to give me strength. Not the composed prayer. The honest one. He hears it. He always has.

Find the one thing you can release.

Not everything at once. One thing. The house. The property. The furniture. The burden that is compounding all the others. What is the one thing that if you let it go — if you sold it, released it, gave it away, stepped back from it — would create enough breathing room for the rest to be manageable? Find that thing. And let it go.

Pastor Nicole Washington is a pastor, teacher, author, speaker, and patient advocate whose family roots run six generations deep in the soil of Georgia and Alabama.

She is the founder of Nicole Washington Ministries, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and the author of fifteen books across three collections.

Currently navigating end-stage renal disease and hemodialysis three times a week, she ministers from the dialysis chair — building free resources, hosting the Still Here Support Group every Tuesday on Zoom at 7 PM EST, and leading IMPACT Black Kidney Health nationally.