Dear Friends,
This is week 2 of the first five chapters I’m posting of One Slice at a Time, my new book about one of the most humbling years of my life. The book has 28 chapters in all. You can read the whole book online at https://theranch.org/one-slice-at-a-time
Here’s Chapter 2.
Chapter 2: It’s Never Just One Thing
“Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you” (1 Kings 19:7b).
I want to tell you about the morning I fell apart on the phone with a woman in a hospital billing office, over four hundred dollars, and won. But I didn’t feel like I won.
Five years earlier, during the prep for my heart surgery, the scans had picked up a couple of aneurysms in my abdomen and some narrowing in my carotid arteries. Nobody had followed up on it. When I finally got in front of a new cardiologist, she looked at my chart and said she couldn’t understand why nobody had checked on this in five years.
I did not want to do those scans.
I didn’t want to spend the money — it was around ten thousand dollars, and the way my coverage works, if they find something wrong, it’s covered, and if they don’t find something wrong I’m on my own. I’d get a thirty-five percent discount for paying up front, which would have saved about a thousand dollars, so there was a decision inside the decision.
But mostly I just didn’t want to know. I only vaguely knew what might go wrong, but as long as I didn’t do the scan, I didn’t have to hear the answer.
I finally scheduled them in a city an hour away, and I scheduled them there on purpose: that office had a doctor on site, so I could do the tests and get the results in the same trip. One drive. One half-day. Done.
I did the first test. I did the second test. Then I asked when I’d be seeing the doctor.
The doctor had called in sick. There was no doctor in the building.
They offered to reschedule me with the doctor for the following week closer to home. Another day off, another drive, and a four-hundred-dollar office visit for a ten-minute conversation about results I had already read online that morning. Unremarkable. Unchanged.
So I asked, as calmly as I could, whether they might waive the fee for that future visit, since I’d only come to this city so I could see the doctor on the same day as the tests.
She said they’d have to charge for that doctor’s visit. It’s the policy.
I said I understand, but if I had missed the appointment without twenty-four hours’ notice, you’d charge me for that too, wouldn’t you?
She said that’s different.
I asked if the doctor could just email me the results. No — it has to be in person. Could we do it by phone? No — it’s policy.
And I could feel it starting. That hot, tight feeling that starts somewhere under my ribs.
I explained it again. Then I explained it again. By the fifth time my voice was up and my hands were shaking and I finally said, loudly, that I would not be paying for that future visit and I would not be taking another half-day off for something that was not my fault.
There was a pause. Then she said, “Well, they called you, didn’t they?”
I said no. Nobody called me. I found out after the tests were over, standing at the front desk.
“Oh,” she said. “They didn’t call you. Okay, that’s different. Let me check on it.”
And that was it. She fixed it. No second charge, just a second drive.
I hung up the phone and sat there shaking, and I did not feel like a man who had just won anything. I felt like the guy who yells at people over four hundred dollars.
The Part That Bothered Me
It wasn’t the first time.
I’d done the same thing with a contractor. I’d done it with an administrator at a school where I’d been staging a production. I’d done it in this marriage more times than I want to count — explain, explain, explain, and then snap. And snapping worked, which was the worst part. People fixed things when I snapped. Nothing seemed to change when I was reasonable.
A few weeks earlier I had cried in a bathroom at Walmart, twenty minutes after walking out of a Celebrate Recovery meeting, a biblically based 12-step program.
So the question I brought to Sharon that week wasn’t about the hospital. It was: what is wrong with me? Why does four hundred dollars take me from a one to a ten? I’ve negotiated contracts. I’ve run a ministry on donations for over three decades. I’ve been in rooms far harder than that office visit.
I laid the whole thing out for her, the whole ridiculous story, expecting her to help me manage my temper.
She said, “The problem is, it’s never just one thing. It’s a pile.”
Doing the Math
I wrote that down, and then I sat with it, and then I did the math on that particular Wednesday.
I had a marriage ending. I had papers sitting unsigned in another state and unsure if they would be. I had five hundred people I’d invited to a celebration who now had to be told something. I had a ministry I’d stopped doing and couldn’t figure out how to start again. I had money going out and not much coming in. And I had two tests I’d been avoiding for five years, and the scans would tell me whether those words were about to become the rest of my life.
That was the load I was carrying into the conversation.
Four hundred dollars didn’t do that to me. Four hundred dollars was just the piece that happened to be on top.
We all know the phrase about the straw that broke the camel’s back. Nobody blames the straw. Everybody understands the problem is the load. But when it’s our own back, we look at the straw and conclude something must be deeply wrong with us.
Sharon put it another way. She said it wasn’t the doctor’s office at all — it was the whole thing, all of it at once. And the same had been true at that school. That hadn’t been one bad evening either. It had been a daily piling on, for months, and I’d read the final evening as evidence about my character.
That was the first genuinely new thought I’d had in weeks. I’d been running a trial in my head with myself as the defendant, and I’d gotten the charges wrong. I wasn’t an unstable man who couldn’t hold it together over a routine billing dispute. I was a man carrying six things who got handed a seventh.
Those are not the same diagnosis, and they don’t have the same treatment.
What God Did About Elijah’s Pile
There’s a story about the prophet Elijah.
Elijah just had one of the greatest days of his career. He stood alone against four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, called down fire from heaven in front of the whole nation, and won. Total victory. Then he outran a chariot on foot all the way to Jezreel.
And then he gets a message from someone saying she intends to kill him.
He runs a full day into the desert, sits down under a bush, and asks God to take his life. One of the greatest prophets in Israel, twenty-four hours after one of the greatest miracles of his life, wants to die because of a threatening message.
It looks completely disproportionate. It is completely disproportionate — if you only count the message.
But look at what God does about it. He doesn’t correct Elijah’s theology. He doesn’t remind him about the fire on the mountain. He doesn’t tell him to pull himself together, and He doesn’t ask him a single question about why he’s overreacting.
He lets him sleep. Then an angel wakes him up and feeds him. Then He lets him sleep again. Then the angel comes back and feeds him a second time and says:
“Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you” (1 Kings 19:7b).
The journey. Not the message. God treated the pile.
The assignment comes later — there’s a mountain, and a wind, and an earthquake, and a fire, and then that famous gentle whisper, and eventually new work to do. But none of that happens until after two meals and two long sleeps. God fed him before He talked to him.
I find that to be an enormous relief. There is a kind of collapse that isn’t a spiritual failure and isn’t a character flaw. Sometimes it’s just weight. And God’s first response to weight is not a sermon.
What Changes When You Know
Two things changed for me once I could see the pile.
The first is that I stopped issuing verdicts on myself from single incidents. That sounds small. It isn’t. Every one of those blowups had been going into a file in my head labeled evidence that I am too weak for my own life, and my wife had been telling me things that agreed with that file, and I was starting to believe the whole thing. Seeing the pile didn’t excuse my high volume on that call. It just correctly assigned it.
The second is that it changed what I do next.
Sharon told me that once I could see the pile, the Holy Spirit would help me compartmentalize — that I’d start being able to take one thing off the top and handle it by itself, without setting off an avalanche. She said I’d begin to think: I am going to deal with this, and nothing else.
The way I do it now is simpler. Before a conversation I know might go sideways, I write down the one thing I want and the one sentence I’ll say. In that office visit, the sentence was: “The doctor wasn’t there. I’m not able to pay for a visit that didn’t happen.” It would have taken nine seconds.
The reason I couldn’t find those words in the moment is that I wasn’t arguing about the appointment. I was arguing about the whole pile, with a woman who had nothing to do with any of it.
The Other Person Has a Pile Too
Sharon told me she watches people’s eyes. If someone won’t look at her, she figures there’s trouble at home, that they’re having a miserable day, and that she’s probably their problem for the moment.
That woman in the office was somebody’s employee, reading a policy off a screen, on some Tuesday of her own. I have no idea what was on her pile. I know I got added to it.
And the person at the school, the one I finally exploded at — when I thought about it honestly, months later, I could see that he’d had plenty stacked up already, and what I said just put him over. His reaction wasn’t proportionate to my sentence either.
None of that means I was wrong about the four hundred dollars. I wasn’t. It means the volume wasn’t about the four hundred dollars, and neither was hers, and neither was his.
Almost nobody you deal with today is responding only to you. That is worth remembering when someone’s reaction to you seems far too big for what you did. And it’s worth remembering when your own reaction is, too.
If you find yourself shaking over something small — and then adding that to the list of things wrong with you — try doing the math first. Write down everything you’re actually carrying this week. Not the incident. The load.
What I found was that I wasn’t falling apart over four hundred dollars. I was carrying six things and somebody handed me a seventh. And once I could see that, I was doing considerably better than I’d thought.
Which raises the real question, and it’s the one I asked Sharon next: what am I supposed to do with a pile that big?
She said something about pie.
Will you pray with me?
Father, thank You that You know exactly what we’re carrying, down to the last item, even when we’ve lost count ourselves. Thank You that when Elijah collapsed, You didn’t lecture him — You fed him and let him sleep, and You called the journey what it was. Lord, would You do that for us? Show us the whole load instead of just the last thing on top of it. Where we’ve been handing down harsh verdicts on ourselves from one bad afternoon, correct us. Where we’ve been quick to judge somebody else’s reaction, give us the grace to remember they’re carrying something we can’t see. And give us the wisdom to take one thing at a time from Your hand. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Questions for Reflection
1. Read 1 Kings 18:36-46 and then 1 Kings 19:1-9. What had Elijah just accomplished, and how much time passed before he wanted to die?
2. Look at how God responds in verses 5-8. What does He do first, and what does He not say? What does that tell you about how God views exhaustion?
3. Think of a recent time your reaction seemed bigger than the situation deserved. Instead of asking what’s wrong with you, try listing everything you were carrying that week. What was actually on the pile?
4. Is there someone whose reaction to you felt out of proportion? What might have been on their pile that you couldn’t see?
Next week: Chapter 3, “One Slice at a Time,” the chapter that gives the book its name. It begins with a list I made at my desk a few days after everything fell apart.
You can read or listen to the whole book, free, at theranch.org/one-slice-at-a-time, where the paperback, Kindle, Audible and Google Play editions are linked too.
Thank you for walking with me.
Love,
Eric Elder writes for page, stage & screen to glorify God’s name so Christ may be seen! Hit reply to send Eric a note! Use this link to subscribe or unsubscribe.