Sometimes life is good—you’re caught up with all your obligations, bills paid, health good, daily pressures manageable, no crises at work.

But other days you feel overwhelmed. The water level of troubles just keeps rising and is past your chest and up to your chin right now. There are messes in your family, your creditors are leaning on you, you don’t feel well, can’t sleep, and then the car won’t start. You don’t know whether to lash out or just slump to the floor and give up. Every day people you know wish they were dead. Last year over one million people in the U.S. acted on suicidal impulses. Twenty-five percent succeeded.

Our Savior Jesus has huge compassion for all his brothers and sisters who are struggling to survive, physically and emotionally. He himself experienced the full measure of human exhaustion, rejection, hunger, thirst, pain, and the torments of the devil. 

Jesus’ ancestor, the poet and musician King David, gives us a vocabulary for expressing our fear, suffering, anxiety, and longing for relief: “As for me, I am poor and needy; may the Lord think of me. You are my help and my deliverer; you are my God, do not delay” (Psalm 40:17). David’s miseries were real, but so were God’s interventions in his life to rescue him. At just the right time, God answered David’s prayer and brought him relief. 

Don’t give up. Pray to your God. Remind him that he is your Father. Articulate your struggle. Let go. Await his good plan.