Spread Too Thin?

When one becomes accustomed to being spread too thin, how does one regain a proper sense of . . . whatever it even is to not be spread thin? Saturation? Ratio of opportunity to needs?

Or so I asked on Facebook. I got a number of interesting and encouraging responses, but it seems to me that most people, even when asked directly about the time following the realization, primarily think in terms of prevention.

Should we really skip over recovery and pondering the experience to thinking we ought to have prevented it in the first place? Are we intentionally wanting to emphasize our own actions and control?

No. We know we need rest. We also know we get into vicious cycles that need to be broken. Absolutely true.

But, getting back to the idiom, “spread too thin” is commonly understood to mean we can’t carry on this way forever. Still, I’m not sure that’s what I mean when I say it. After all, I know change is coming. I never expect my current situation to last forever—unless we’re talking about my fears of inadequacy. (Those stay pretty regular.)

When I say I’m spread too thin, it’s like a certain part of me is stretching and I fear even for its elasticity. Elasticity I often depend on!

Cycles are part of nature & Christian life, as far as I can tell. We go too far, realize it, and turn back. We rest. We start over. Maybe we go a little while longer between the cycle begins again, or more likely we discover yet another line to cross or bridge to burn. <sigh> But isn’t elasticity something too? I feel like there are words that should be better suited. Resilience? Flexibility? Rebounding?

Anyway, I offer you this tidbit from The Lord of the Rings: “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

That is a fabulous statement on so many levels. Note: it presumes both butter and bread. Is it the butter’s fault? No. The bread? No. Is it the scraping? Nope. It is imbalance on a primary level.

And, ultimately, it is sin behind the disproportion. Bilbo sought rest and found it among the Elves and then in the undying lands.

I have certain ambitions. And, because they tend to be projects rather than continuing endeavors, I find it particularly hard to gauge how draining they may be. Plus, you know, kids, family, PW life, etc. I never know when homeschooling is going to seem suddenly wildly out of control.

I can wait for the tide to turn and change to come. It does. I do. Even that, though, I don’t think is quite addressing the “spread.”

Is it that someone has spread me? I don’t think so.

Folks. I’m wrestling with bread and butter. But am I alone in thinking it’s bizarre that we don’t have stages between ok and spread too thin? At a retreat I attended, Katie Koplin suggested you can find the line if one little thing goes wrong: does that make everything else explode? Because that’s the “too thin” to nothing line.

Yet isn’t this all daily stuff, affecting, frankly, our daily bread? I think it’s worth pondering. At times while eating a big ol’ bag of Doritos. lol

Bread & butter, folks: often the very stuff we choose to life off of.

Lord, give us this day our daily bread. Even the daily bread that falls between cracks we cannot understand. Amen.