The Stress of "Not Enough" // Stress Busters, Part 3

A Different Perspective Official Podcast

One of the most stressful things in this life is not having enough to go around. Enough time, to get everything done. Enough money to make ends meet. Enough skills and abilities to get the job done. When you’ve suffered under the stress of not enough, how have you coped with it?

It seems to me that there are three basic resources that you and I need to get by each day. Time, money and expertise. Time because there are only twenty-four hours in a day and we have to sleep sometime no matter how much we need to get everything done. Money because without money there's nowhere to live, no food to eat, no ability to get a whole bunch of other things done and expertise because you and I don't have the ability to do everything for ourselves in any organisation, be it a family, a Church, business, whatever, we need different skill sets.

And when we're short of any of those three basic resources, time, money or expertise, that can cause us an enormous amount of stress. Let's start by looking at time. I don't know when the term 'time poor' came into common usage but these days you hear it a lot, people are time poor.

In fact once you have enough money to cover the basic necessities of life, time becomes your most important commodity and for many people time is too short. Oh if only the day had a few extra hours in it, I've heard people say. Really? I get to the end of the working day and as much as I enjoy what it is I do I'm pretty much beat, I've had it, I need a rest.

The more advanced an economy becomes it seems and the more money we have the more options we have for spending our time. I mean the latest stats for how much time teenagers and young adults spend on social media each day are absolutely staggering. Right now 11% of the world’s population are active Facebook users, just think about that, 11% and we're spending collectively seven hundred billion minutes on Facebook each month.

Now just to give you an idea, one billion seconds is almost thirty-two years but we're talking seven hundred billion minutes or around 1.3 million person years every month are being spent on Facebook and that doesn't count watching television and all the other entertainment options available to us. No wonder we're time poor.

So why is this? What's changed? Why have we all of a sudden become time poor? Because we're trying to cram too much into our day, we're always online, we're always connected, we're always working, we're always chatting, we're always doing something and we've forgotten how to have quiet disconnected down time. If that's you and you're burning the candle at both ends something has to give otherwise the stress is going to kill you, really.

And just in case you're one of these workaholics who just has to work eighteen hours a day otherwise civilisation as we know it is going to come to an end, here's a different perspective, God’s perspective, Psalm 127 verses 1 and 2:

Unless the Lord builds the house those who build it are labouring in vain and unless the Lord guards the city the guards keep watch in vain. It's absolutely in vain that you rise up early and go late to bed eating the bread of anxious toil because God gives sleep to those whom he loves.

It's simply not God’s plan for you to be burning the candle at both ends. A while back I recorded a whole teaching series on this subject called It's Time To Stop Labouring In Vain so if you have this problem of being a workaholic mosey along to the resources section of our website www.christianityworks.com and you'll find that teaching series under the heading Living In Victory.

Now the second thing that causes us stress is a lack of money. Sometimes that's simply because people don't have enough to get by, in fact can I tell you the vast majority of the millions of people who will listen to this program around the world today in places like Africa and parts of Asia, don't have enough money to make ends meet.

Other times it's because those who do have enough money squander what they have on impulse buys, on things they don't need, on food that they've bought and then because of their bad management it goes off in the refrigerator so they throw it out.

I want to deal with this wastage thing first because it's criminal. With people starving in the world wasting money on stuff we don't need is criminal but the problem is that the advertisers have got it down to a fine art. They seem to be able to get you and me to part with our money like nobody else.

So the question you have to ask yourself, the thing that's going to get you to change your mind about this is whether the stress of it is worth it. Whether having all those things makes you happy or whether at the end of the day the lack of finances makes you stressed because:

Those who want to be rich end up falling into temptation, they're trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge them into ruin and destruction because the love of money is in fact the root of all kinds of evil and in their eagerness to be rich some people have wandered away from their faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

1 Timothy chapter 6, verses 9 and 10.

Come on, is it really worth it all this stuff, I mean really? Or is it time to get your house in order, is it time to get money wise? Again I've recorded a whole series called How To Be Money Wise that you'll find in the Living In Victory section of the resources library of www.christianityworks.com. Sort that out and the stress goes away, believe you me it's worth it.

And for those who are poor, desperately poor let me say this to you, in fact not me, Jesus. Matthew chapter 6 verses 31 to 34:

Don't worry saying, 'What am I going to eat, what am I going to drink, what am I going to wear?' Because it's the Gentiles who strive after all those things and indeed your heavenly Father already knows that you need these things but first strive for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.

Come on God knows what you need and He will provide for you so:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, don't lean on your own understanding but in all your ways acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

Your God will surely provide for you and once you learn to trust in Him to do those things, the things you can't do and provide the things you need when you can't acquire them for yourself, the stress will be replaced by the most amazing peace and assurance.

Finally the other thing that causes us stress when we're without is expertise. When I look at this ministry of Christianityworks that produces the radio program you're listening to right now, okay I'm the front guy, I'm the guy who can write, I'm the voice that you hear but without Max here in the studio there would be nothing. Without Jacqui and Tania in the office you wouldn't have anything to listen to.

Without Joseph in Ghana and Joseph in Uganda and Elia and Isaac in India and the many volunteers around the world, without their expertise there'd be no radio program. One of the biggest things that you and I can do to cause ourselves stress is not to value and recognise the different capabilities of the people around us because when we don't cherish them they desert us.

I see it all the time, leaders who think everybody should be exactly like them so they drive their people hard and all of a sudden there's no one to lead. A true leader recognises other people's gifts and skills. A true leader encourages them and empowers people to be all that they can be and whether we're leaders or not we need other people around us who will co-operate in getting things done.

Without them we're under stress with a capital 'S' because without them we have to do the things they're good at, things that invariably we're not good at. There's something incredibly stressful about being a square peg in a round hole.

It's easy to be stressed by not having enough, enough time, money or expertise but when we lean on God, I mean really trust Him, the stress goes away because what we discover is that God provides richly for those whom He loves, He just does.