When You Can’t Keep Going Like This

You've been sneaking into the bathroom just to stand there, not crying, not praying, just trying to get thirty seconds where nobody says your name. That's not a spiritual failure. That's a body that has nothing left.

You might be carrying genuinely real things. Grief. A body that isn't cooperating. A husband who needs your support, kids who need your presence, and a calendar that keeps moving even when you don't have anything left to bring to it. And somewhere in the middle of it all, you decided that carrying it without stopping was what faithfulness looked like. But love started looking like numbness, devotion started feeling like disappearing, and you can't figure out why following God this hard has left you this empty.

Romans 12:1 says to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Not just your intentions. Not just your effort. Your body. This episode reframes what it means to take that word living seriously — for the overwhelmed Christian woman who's been treating her own limits like they're inconveniences instead of information God put there on purpose.

In this episode, Romans 12:1, 1 Kings 19:5-7, and Isaiah 40:29 build a picture of what stewardship actually looks like, including what God said to Elijah when he was completely done under a tree, and why He said it before asking him to take the next step.

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Transcript

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We had just dropped the kids off at school. Keaton and I were about three minutes from the hospital when my stepsister called. I already knew what it meant when I saw her name. I answered it and she told me Ronda was gone. I gasped and I said no. That was it, just no. And I'll never forget looking over at Keaton in the driver's seat as he slammed his fists on the steering wheel. Not at me, not because he was angry. It was just this immediate helpless grief, like his body reacted before either one of us had time to process what had actually happened. He dropped me off at the entrance. I got out and I ran. I was wearing sandals like Nike slides, and they were slowing me down, so I took them off, barefoot on the hospital floor, running down the hallway, because I needed to get there and I needed to get there now. I pushed open the door to her room. Rhonda was still in the bed. My dad was sitting there quiet with the chaplain. My dad had missed the call from the hospital that morning, so when he got there, he wasn't expecting that news. He wasn't expecting to walk into the room and find out his wife had already passed. Rhonda was my stepmom. I was close to her, I was grateful for her, and I'd already been grieving her illness in pieces because that's what terminal illness does. It makes your heart start grieving before the actual ending comes. But when she died, it still hit me harder than I expected. The part that surprised me most was the guilt, which maybe doesn't make sense from the outside because we knew she was sick. We knew where things were going, but grief doesn't care what you know logically. It still shows up with a list. I should have called more, I should have visited more, I should have spent more time with her and asked her more questions. I should have done this all differently. I should have just been better. It almost felt like I had failed her through her illness. And I don't think that was true. I'd never look at someone else going through the same thing and say, you failed because you didn't do every possible thing you could have done. But I felt like that. Sometimes what you know and what you feel aren't in the same place yet. So I want to talk today about that season, not just the grief, but what it did to my body, my mind, and my limits. Because I had to learn slowly and not very gracefully that caring for the body God gave me wasn't extra. It wasn't vanity or selfish, it was part of stewardship. Welcome to Made for This. I'm Katrina Gamble, and this is a podcast for Christian wives and mothers who want to embrace their God-given purpose and live their calling with clarity and conviction. Each week, we talk through the real pressures of marriage, motherhood, and managing a home so you can respond with steadiness, self-control, and faith in the middle of everyday life. If you've ever felt overwhelmed or unsure how to carry it all well, you're in the right place. Keaton was running for school board. Campaign season was a whole huge thing. Evenings, weekends, fundraisers, forums, door knocking, messages, phone calls, and a calendar that somehow became its own person with its own demands. Honestly, I was so proud of him. And it was a massive time commitment. He wasn't absent. He wasn't off doing his own thing while I was drowning in the background. That isn't what happened. He was with me. He was the one driving me to the hospital that morning. And when Rhonda passed, he took about a week away from the campaign. He carried what he could carry, but the campaign was still there. Work was still there, and parenting responsibilities, those never go away. That's one of the hard things about hard seasons. They don't wait until the calendar clears or the house gets caught up or your body feels better. Everyone is emotionally prepared. At the same time, I was in the middle of being diagnosed with POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. My heart rate would spike every time I stood up. I was having near-fainting episodes at least six times a day. I was wearing heart monitors for days at a time. I was going to cardiology appointments, and eventually the official diagnosis came when I did a tilt table test and passed out about a minute and a half in. So, you know, just casual. I was also learning more about what was happening in my body with hypermobile Ellers-Danlos syndrome, which affects connective tissue and collagen production. So there was this whole other layer happening too, not just grief or the campaign or the kids. My actual body was waving both arms in the air like, hello, we are not okay. And I wish I could tell you I immediately listened, but I didn't. I mostly just kept going because the kids still had school, soccer, basketball, performances, and birthday parties. I was also the room parent for Ella's second grade class, which I'd signed up for because I wanted to be that mom, the one who knew all the parents, who organized all the things, who just showed up. And I still don't think that desire was wrong. I don't think wanting to be involved in your child's life is wrong. And I don't think supporting your husband is wrong or helping your grieving dad is wrong. That's part of what made this season so confusing. A lot of what I was doing was good. It was love and it mattered. When Rhonda died, and there were all the things that have to be handled after someone dies: the calls, the paperwork, funeral, the obituary, photos and flowers, all the details that feel both sacred and administrative at the same time. Someone had to do that. And my dad had just lost his wife. He was grieving, and he was also so grateful. He thanked me and told me he knew I was busy, and he told me he couldn't have done it without me. Truly, I didn't feel invisible. That wasn't the difficulty. Keaton saw me, my dad saw me, I was loved and I was thanked and I was supported, but I was still depleted. That was the part I didn't know how to convey because I think sometimes we act like being appreciated should make exhaustion easier. Like if people see what we're doing, then somehow that should just fill you back up. Like if the thing you're doing is meaningful enough, your body should just understand and cooperate. But it doesn't work that way. Being loved doesn't mean you no longer have limits. And being thanked doesn't just magically refill your nervous system. Being needed doesn't make you less human. I wasn't invisible. I was just stretched so thin that there was almost nothing left for the parts of me that were immediately useful to someone else. And I don't mean that in a bitter way. I love being a wife and a mom, and I love my dad and I loved Rhonda, and I wanted to show up, but me as a person, not me as the mom or the wife or the daughter, just me with a body and a mind and actual limits was exhausted. And eventually, I started just going into our master bathroom and closing the door. Not to do anything or even to cry, just to stand there in the quiet because my brain had nowhere else to go. Maybe you know that feeling, not tired, but past tired. The kind of tired where silence feels like you're taking a deep breath or where you aren't even asking for a whole day off. You just want one door closed for 30 seconds where nobody says your name. That was me. And that's what this episode is about. Not the version of you who has already learned the lesson and now protects your peace with perfect boundaries and a color-coded calendar. Although honestly, color-coding the calendar did become one of the things I learned in that season. I live and die by the calendar now. I'm speaking to the version of you that is still in this, still telling herself she's fine, still trying to make the math work when the math is very clearly not mathing. A few weeks after Rhonda died, close to the election, I just broke. I don't have an actual memory for this part, and I wish I did. It would probably make this story a lot better. But I can't tell you who was in the room or what happened. It was honestly just a blur. I know I cried and I am sure that I yelled. And I know that I said I just can't do it anymore. I was struggling with the situation, the pressure, the fact that everything was still moving and I didn't feel like I had anything left to move with it. The thing I remember most isn't even the breaking. It's what I'd been telling myself before I broke. Every time I felt exhausted, every time I walked into the bathroom and closed the door, or every time my body tried to get my attention, I talked myself out of listening. I kept thinking, this is what you're here for, this is your season. Carry it. I don't know if I would have said it exactly like that at the time. Probably not, but that's the message that was underneath. Just keep going. Keaton's busy, don't add pressure. Your dad is grieving, don't make it about you. The kids need stability, don't let them feel forgotten. Everyone has something hard. Keep going. Keaton wasn't asking me to pretend I was fine, and my dad wasn't demanding more than I could give. And my kids, they were just being kids. This was all happening inside of me. I'd taken real responsibilities and turned them into this rule that sounded faithful, but it wasn't actually wisdom. The rule was if it matters, I should be able to carry it without stopping. And I think that's where I got confused because there are seasons where love really does require sacrifice. There are moments where you show up tired. I'm not going to try to pretend that life is gentle. It's not always gentle, but there's a difference between sacrificial love and pretending you don't have a body. There's a difference between faithfulness and refusing to receive anything back. I didn't know that difference clearly enough yet. There's a verse in Romans 12 that says, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. I didn't have some huge spiritual moment in the middle of that season where I opened my Bible to Romans 12 and suddenly everything made sense. This connection came later when I was trying to make sense of what happened and why I'd gotten so depleted in the middle of doing so many things that were good. When I kept reading this verse, I realized I'd probably been hearing living sacrifice in a way that wasn't quite right. I had heard it and thought, pour out, give more, and hold nothing back. And I know Romans 12 is saying something much bigger than take care of yourself. I'm not trying to minimize the whole passage into just a wellness message. It says, present your bodies, not just your intentions, not just your spiritual thoughts or the version of you that wants to do the right thing, your body. And my body was the part I kept treating like it was in the way. It needed too much sleep. It got dizzy, it ached. It needed exercise and water and food and rest and strength and quiet. It needed things I didn't feel like I had time to give it. My body was making me frustrated and sad. Like if I were really faithful, I'd be able to drag it along behind me and just keep going. But God gave me a body with limits on purpose. He gave me a nervous system that sends signals when it's overloaded. And he gave me a need for sleep and food and movement. He gave me a body that, especially with pots and Ellers Danlos, can't be cared for just whenever. I have to care for it on purpose. This all changed the way I thought about exercise. Long ago, exercise was something I loved, but I hadn't done it consistently in almost six years. And then suddenly with pots, exercise wasn't just this thing I should probably get back into someday. It became part of managing the symptoms, which is really, really frustrating because when your body already feels exhausted, and then the helpful thing is you need to build strength, that just feels rude because it's also exhausting. But it was true. And with the Ellers Danlos, I started thinking about longevity too, stability, strength, not getting older and weaker faster than I needed to. I didn't start thinking about my health for vanity or because I wanted my body to look a certain way, but because my body is part of what God has given me to steward. And I don't think I'd really connected those dots before. I knew self-care meant taking care of myself, but that can mean so many different things depending on who is saying it. Romans 12 gave me a better frame. Caring for my body isn't the reward after I've done everything else. It's part of staying able to do what's actually mine to do. And in 1 Kings 19, Elijah has just come off one of the most dramatic moments in scripture. He'd just called down fire from heaven. He'd been used by God in a huge and unmistakable way. And then almost immediately after, he's afraid and exhausted and done. He goes into the wilderness, sits under a tree, and asks God to let him die. That isn't just a rough afternoon. It's not like I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. He's legit just done. And God's response, he lets him sleep. And then an angel comes and says, Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you. There's bread and there's water, and Elijah eats and drinks and lies down again. The journey was still Elijah's to take. God wasn't disqualifying him and saying, Never mind, you're too weak. I'll just find someone else. Elijah does get up and he keeps going. He travels for 40 days and 40 nights in the strength of what God provided. So I don't think the point is you can't do this. I think the point is you can't do this like this, not unfed or unrested, not running on nothing. The journey is too great for you to take on what you currently have. I really needed to understand that. Because I'd heard people say God will never give you more than you can handle. And I understand what people mean when they say that. They're usually trying to comfort, they're trying to say God is faithful. But in that season, I didn't need someone to tell me you can handle this. I needed someone to say you can keep going, but not without rest, not without food, not while ignoring the body God gave you. I wasn't busy just for the sake of being busy. These were real people and real needs. The answer wasn't to pretend I could carry everything faithfully while refusing to be replenished. That's where I think we get it wrong sometimes. We act like rest is what you do after the work is over. But here, rest is what God gives before Elijah takes the next part of the journey, before the 40 days, before the next conversation, before the next assignment. Bread, water, sleep first, then go. There's also a moment in the Gospels where Jesus tells his disciples to come away and rest for a while because so many people were coming and going that they didn't even have time to eat. Not because the people didn't matter, because they did. But the disciples were still human. After the election at Christmas, Keaton gave me a gift: candles, a heated blanket, a bath pillow, and a tray for my kindle and my coffee. Along with all of that came a standing block of time at least once a month, where he takes the kids somewhere so I can have the house to myself. No one needing anything or talking or asking for a snack, no one walking through the room I had just cleaned, no one undoing the thing while I was still doing the thing. I didn't think finally someone saw me. Keaton had already seen me and so had my dad. That's part of why this gift mattered. It felt more like I know what this was like for you, and I want there to be something that gives back to you. Not to me as a wife or as the mom or the person who handles the details, just me, a person with a tired and achy body and a tired and achy mind, a woman with limits. And he didn't have to explain the candles or the heated blanket or the bath tray. Those things kind of spoke for themselves. But the monthly time was specific. He'd take the kids somewhere so I could do something relaxing for me. And the first time he did it, I cleaned the house, which maybe ruins the sentiment of the story and the gift. I know I'm probably supposed to say that I lit a candle and I took a bath and I read under the heated blanket like a woman in a commercial for rest. But I cleaned the house and I loved it. I really did. Because nobody was in the way, nobody was asking where something was, nobody needed lunch while my hands were dirty scrubbing who knows what off the walls. Nobody walked through the room I'd just finished. It was quiet and it was mine. And somehow cleaning alone felt restful because the house had been one of the things constantly pestering me in the background. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's what it felt like. Sometimes rest isn't only sitting still. Sometimes restoration is having enough space to put your world back in order without being interrupted every 12 seconds. For me, sometimes it's baking or reading or cleaning. Sometimes it's sitting in a room where no one is talking to you and letting your body remember it's allowed to just relax. That gift mattered because it was thoughtful. It wasn't generic. Keaton had taken the hard thing and turned it into something practical and tender. He had watched that season take from me and then created something that he knew would restore me. And that makes me think about Elijah again. Not because Keaton giving me a Christmas gift is exactly the same thing as an angel showing up in the wilderness, obviously. Although if he had given me bread, I would have been happy. There isn't much better than a good sourdough, honestly. But there was something similar in the meaning behind it. Before the next thing, there was care, something practical that said, you don't have to keep going on fumes. And I needed that more than I knew. When I was sneaking into our bathroom, I wasn't thinking anything. That's what I remember. There was no internal monologue, no clear prayer or conviction, no plan, just silence. Because my brain had nowhere left to go. That was the sign I missed. I'd been telling myself it was faithfulness that carrying everything without complaint was what love looked like. That if I could just hold it together long enough, I was doing what I was supposed to do. But faithfulness has a voice, it has a reason, it knows why it's doing what it's doing. And when you're standing in your bathroom with nothing in your head, sometimes that isn't faithfulness. Sometimes that's your body telling you it has nothing left. It's not a moral failure or a weakness. It's what happens when you have been trying to be a living sacrifice without honoring the living part. I had to learn that my body isn't separate from my obedience. I still have limits I'd rather not have. I still have to choose what actually restores me instead of what sounds like it should restore me. Working out restores me, and so does reading. Having Christian content in my ears as much as I can really restores me. Worship music in the house and in the car and while I'm working, that's part of it too. During that season, what restored me wasn't only the alone time, although I needed that. It was getting into my faith whenever I could find a pocket of time. Podcasts, sermons, worship music, something uplifting and optimistic and educational in my ears while I cleaned or drove or worked, while I tried to get through the day with a body that felt unreliable and a heart that felt heavy. Looking back, I clearly needed God's voice getting into the noise of my day. The quiet gave me a break, and the faith gave me back to myself. And I think this is where Isaiah 40 started to matter to me too. It says God gives power to the faint and increases strength for the one who has no might. Not the person pretending she's fine, the faint. And I was faint, not metaphorically, like literally sometimes, which sounds dramatic, but also pots. So yes, I didn't need to become stronger before I came to God. I needed to come to Him because I wasn't strong enough on my own. That has become one of the practical changes for me. Finding my limit, actually finding it. Not the imaginary limit of the woman I wish I were, not the imaginary limit of the mom who can volume. Volunteer for everything, attend everything, keep the house running, exercise every day, read, pray, show up emotionally, and somehow still have a nervous system that just works. That woman doesn't live in my house. My real limit requires choice. So Keaton and I started alternating who goes to our son's basketball games. And honestly, that's hard because I love supporting him. I want to be there for every point he scores and every rebound he makes. I want him to look up and see me. I don't want to miss those things. But if both of us are committed to every single thing, every single time, the house stalls. Everything stacks up, the weekend disappears, and the next week starts already behind. And everyone feels it. So we make choices. Not because we don't care, because we do. Because caring about our family includes caring about the structure our family has to live inside. I say no to things I genuinely want to do. Volunteering, church groups, extra commitments that sound good and probably are good, but still require capacity. I may not have, and that's been humbling because I like being the person who says yes. I like being useful and involved. I like being that mom. But every yes costs something. And if I'm not honest about what I have, I don't just pay for it. My family does too. It's just true. When I ignore my limits, they eventually have to live with the version of me that's left. And that version is short and irritable and sometimes numb. That version is hiding in the bathroom because she can't form a thought, and that's not the woman I want to give them. I know there will be seasons where the limits get stretched, anyways. I'm saying I know now that rest isn't what I earn after I've proven I can carry it all. Rest is part of how God strengthens me to carry what's actually mine. If you're listening and thinking, but people really do need me, I believe you. They probably do. Your kids need you, your husband needs you, your parents may need you, your church, your work, your home, your people. There may be real needs in front of you, and I'm not going to pretend the answers are always simple. Sometimes the journey really is yours to take, but you can't take it faithfully while pretending your body has no limit. Everybody has a limit, not everybody like the general concept. Everybody, your actual body, the one you live in, the one that gets tired and carries stress and needs food and sleep and movement and quiet, the one God gave you. And I'm sure if you're honest with yourself, you probably know your limit. You know the warning signs and what happens before you hit the wall. You know when your patience gets thinner and when your brain starts to fog, when your body starts asking for mercy, when you start disappearing into the bathroom or the closet or the car just to get a second where no one needs anything from you. The invitation isn't to shame yourself for having a limit. The invitation is to recognize it for your own strength, for your family's well-being. So maybe the next step is simple. Tell the truth about your capacity before you keep going. Maybe that means eating, sleeping, asking your husband to take the kids for an hour, saying no to the thing you want to say yes to, working out because your body needs strength, or putting worship music on in the kitchen because the noise in your head has gotten too loud. Maybe it's opening the Bible for five minutes, even though you wish you had more time. Or maybe it's looking at the calendar and asking, what do I actually have capacity for right now? And then respecting that answer. I think that's stewardship. It's not perfection or selfishness, it's stewardship, taking seriously what God has placed in your hands, including the body and mind and spirit he gave you to carry with it. You're not here to burn yourself down. You're not more faithful because you're more depleted. And God isn't standing over you impressed by how long you can ignore the warning signs. And sometimes before he tells you to keep walking, he gives you bread and water and rest. So get up and eat. The journey ahead may be yours, but it's too important to take on what you currently have. Let yourself be tended to. Let the people who love you help. Let God get into the ordinary moments of your day before you hand everything else out. You're a living sacrifice, and the living part matters. If you're in a season where you're realizing you've been running on empty, don't rush past that. Let that be the invitation this week. Notice the warning sign. Tell the truth about your capacity and take one small step of stewardship before you hit the wall. And if a woman comes to mind while you're listening, someone who's been calling depletion faithfulness or pushing past her limits because everyone needs something from her, send this episode to her when you have the time. And if you want to keep walking through what it looks like to live your calling as a wife and a mother with more clarity, conviction, and honesty, make sure you subscribe to Made for This so you don't miss the next episode.