“God only gives you what you can handle”

There are several variations on this, as in:

“God only gives you what He knows you can handle. Therefore I have no reason to be stressed, instead I am blessed and fulfilled.”

Or, my favorite:

“I know God won't give me anything I can't handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much.”
― Mother Teresa

This platitude is, of course, very problematic—obviously, if your problems are so bad that you cannot handle them, then you most likely are dead or lying drunk in an alley somewhere. The very fact that you are reading this means that your burdens are lighter than you can handle. This platitude is a non-starter. It is self-fulfilling and circular.

This idea is mainly a defense of the “God is Good” idea. It implies that if you have horrible, horrible problems, they you should not blame God for not helping you because:

(1)   God is only testing you. You can survive this… if you trust God.

Or,

(2) By complaining you prove that you are weak and flawed. You are just a complainer, and if you had  relied on God in the first place, you probably wouldn’t have these problems now. You failed by not praying enough, being humble enough, sacrificing enough goats — or maybe you could have avoided these problems altogether by paying a priest to read the entrails of a dove to forewarn you.

The claim is that we are given no more pain than we can bear. I would suggest you say this to a hospice nurse and see what reaction you get. Of course you can survive the pain, because if you didn’t survive the pain, you are dead. The logic is clearly circular.

These sorts of religious platitudes are quite common, sometimes leading to the question:

If God only "gives you as much as you can handle" why do some people snap & kill their co-workers or families?

The answer, for Christians, is that this person wouldn’t have “snapped” if they had God in their lives. Good Christians who rely on God don’t snap because (see above):

“God only gives you what He knows you can handle. Therefore I have no reason to be stressed, instead I am blessed and fulfilled.”