When the Whole Family Is Out of Strength: ‘Not by Our Own Strength’ (a Shared Surrender)

It’s a strange thing, to feel a whole house run out of strength at the same time.

You notice it in the small signals first. Nobody is laughing at supper. The dishes sit. Somebody’s shoulders are up around their ears, somebody else won’t meet your eyes, and the silence in the hallway has a weight to it that wasn’t there a month ago. Your own jaw is set in that low all-day clench, your shoulders won’t drop, and when you finally lie down the body stays wound up and your mind starts the 2am loop — who’s looking after whom, and who, exactly, is looking after me. You have been the one holding the air in the room steady so the others can breathe. But you can feel it now: the family is tired in a way that no single person being brave is going to fix. You’ve hit the limit together.

I want to sit in that with you for a moment before we open the Bible, because the verse you came looking for will only land if we’re honest about where you are. This is a different kind of depletion than the personal kind. When you alone are out of strength, you can sometimes hide it, ration it, push through for the sake of the others. But when the whole unit is spent — the household, the marriage, the family bracing around an illness or a loss or a long hard season — there’s no one left on the bench to send in. The strong one is also tired. The fixer needs fixing. And the awful, lonely fear underneath it all is: if I let go, the whole thing falls, because I’m the last one standing.

There is an old line for exactly this — for a people, not just a person, staring at something far too big for all of them put together. We have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee. It is the verse for the day the whole family is out of strength. Not a rebuke that you didn’t try hard enough. A release — for all of you at once.

The short answer: the “not by our own strength” Bible verse

The clearest not by our own strength Bible verse is 2 Chronicles 20:12, where King Jehoshaphat prays for an entire terrified nation: “We have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee” (KJV). It’s the plural, shared version of surrender — a whole people admitting they’re out of strength together and turning their gaze, as one, toward God. The point isn’t that no one acts; it’s that the outcome was never resting on the family’s combined willpower. You can be out of strength as a group and still be held as one.

What this page is for

This is for the reader inside a household, a marriage, a family, or a close community that has hit its limit as a group — not just you, but everyone under the roof tired at the same time. We’ll go through it by where the shared exhaustion actually is, so you can jump to the part that matches what your house feels like:

• When you’re the last one standing and the whole thing rests on you
• When nobody knows what to do anymore
• When you’re all carrying it, but carrying it alone, side by side
• When someone else has to hold your arms up because you can’t
• When there’s no joy left in the house to run on
• The body practice — for a household, not just a self

Each verse comes with the text (King James Version, with a light note where the original language opens something), a few honest sentences, one small thing to do with your body, and a short prayer. Take what helps. Leave the rest. You don’t have to do this perfectly — that’s rather the point.

When you’re the last one standing and the whole thing rests on you

Let’s start where it actually hurts. Everyone else has reached their limit, and so somehow you’ve appointed yourself the one who isn’t allowed to. You’re carrying the household’s collective fear as well as your own — managing everyone’s exhaustion while quietly running on empty. The terror is specific: I cannot fall apart, because I am the last load-bearing wall, and if I go, the house comes down on the people I love.

2 Chronicles 20:12 (KJV)

“O our God, wilt thou not judge them? for we have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee.”

Here is what undoes me about this prayer, and why it belongs to a tired household and not just a tidy sermon. Jehoshaphat was the king — the last one standing, the one everyone was looking at to do something. Three armies were marching on his people. And instead of projecting strength he did not have, he stood up in front of the whole frightened nation — wives, children, the lot, all named in the very next verses as standing there — and said the bravest thing a leader can say: we have no might. We don’t even know what to do. He didn’t manufacture a plan to reassure them. He turned, in front of everyone, and put his eyes on God. And — read what comes next in the chapter — the word back was, the battle is not yours, but God’s.

Notice the plural all the way through. Not I have no might — we. He surrendered on behalf of the room. He gave the whole household permission to be out of strength at once, by being the first to admit it. You being the strong one was never the plan. You being the one who turns the family’s eyes toward the only One strong enough — that is the plan. And you cannot do that while you’re still performing invincibility for everyone watching.

Body practice: Right now, lift your eyes. Literally — if your gaze has been down at the floor or the phone or the endless list, raise it. Look up and out, even just at the ceiling, even at the sky through a window. Let your chin come up and your throat open. Breathe in, and on the long exhale, silently say: our eyes are upon thee. Not I’ve got this. Our eyes. You don’t have to know what to do. You only have to turn your face.

A prayer:

Lord, I have been standing as though I’m the last wall holding up this house, and I am so tired of being strong for all of them. We have no might against this thing. I don’t even know what to do anymore. So here are not just my eyes, but ours — I’m turning the whole household’s gaze toward You. The battle is not mine. Let it be Yours. Amen.

When nobody knows what to do anymore

Sometimes the exhaustion isn’t only fatigue — it’s the awful blankness of having run out of answers. Every plan you tried as a family has failed. The advice has run dry. You sit around the table or lie in the dark and the honest collective truth is: none of us knows the way through this. That not-knowing is its own kind of depletion, and it can feel like a moral failure, as though a competent family would have figured it out by now.

Psalm 25:4-5 (KJV)

“Shew me thy ways, O LORD; teach me thy paths. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou art the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day.”

I love that this prayer doesn’t begin with give me strength. It begins with show me the way — because sometimes a household isn’t short on grit, it’s short on direction, and bracing harder in the wrong direction only wears everyone out faster. There’s a deep relief in being allowed to say, as a family, we don’t know the path, and we’re going to stop pretending we do. The Hebrew word here for “ways” — derek — is simply a road, a well-worn track. You’re not asking to be made superhuman. You’re asking to be shown the next stretch of road, which is a thing the tired are allowed to ask for.

And look at the last line: on thee do I wait all the day. Waiting, here, is not passivity. It’s the active posture of a people who have stopped frantically generating their own solutions and are watching for the One who knows the road. If your house is lost as well as tired, this is the prayer that fits.

If direction is the thing your household is most short on, there’s a companion piece written entirely for that fog — a Psalms prayer for strength and guidance — for when the question isn’t only give us strength but show us which way.

Body practice: If you can, do this one with another person in the house — but it works alone too. Sit, and unclench your hands from the problem; rest them open on your knees, palms up, the way you’d hold them to receive something rather than to grip it. Breathe out slowly, and let the exhale carry the words show us the way. You are not generating the path. You are opening your hands to be led down it.

A prayer:

God, we’ve run out of answers in this house. Every plan we made has failed, and none of us knows what to do next. We’re tired of pretending we have it figured out. Show us Your way — not a burst of strength to push harder in the wrong direction, but the next stretch of road. On You we wait, all of us, all the day. Amen.

When you’re all carrying it, but carrying it alone, side by side

This is the cruellest version of shared exhaustion — when a whole household is going through the same hard thing, and yet each person is suffering it in a separate, sealed room. You pass each other in the hallway carrying identical weights and never set them down together. Everyone is being strong for everyone else, which means no one is actually being held by anyone. The family is together and utterly alone at once.

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, 12 (KJV)

“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up… And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”

Read this slowly, because it’s almost unbearably practical. Woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up. The writer isn’t being sentimental about togetherness — he’s being honest about how survival actually works. The point of the others in your house is not that everyone stays strong simultaneously (you can’t; you’ve proved that). The point is that you fall in shifts. When one is down, another lifts. Strength in a family was never meant to be everyone at full power at once. It was meant to be a rotation — and a threefold cord, three strands wound together, holding what no single thread could.

So here is the gentle reframe for a house full of people suffering separately: you are allowed to fall in front of each other. The strength of the family is not each member being individually unbreakable. It’s the cord — the weaving — and the cord includes the One who, in the old reading of this passage, is the third strand Himself. Stop carrying it in separate sealed rooms. Set it down where someone can see you.

Body practice: Find one person in your household — partner, child, parent, friend — and do something small and physical that admits the weight: a hand on a shoulder, a long hug where you actually let your weight lean in, sitting close enough that your arms touch. Don’t fix anything. Just stop being alone in the same room. If there’s no one near right now, place your own hand over your heart and feel it — you are not, in fact, the only thread; the third strand is nearer than the hallway.

A prayer:

Lord, we are all carrying this, and somehow all carrying it alone. We pass each other in the dark and never set it down together. Teach us to fall in shifts — to let one lift the other instead of all of us pretending to stand. Be the third strand in our cord, the strength wound through the middle of us, so we are not quickly broken. Amen.

When someone else has to hold your arms up because you can’t

There comes a point in a long collective trial where the strong one simply cannot keep their own arms up any longer — and the only way through is to let someone else hold them up for you. For a person used to being the supporter, this is the hardest surrender of all: to be carried by your own household instead of carrying it.

Exodus 17:11-12 (KJV)

“And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. But Moses’ hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.”

This is one of the most quietly tender pictures in all of scripture, and it’s almost never read as being about being carried. Moses — the leader, the man everyone depended on, the one whose lifted hands held the whole battle — got tired. His arms gave out. Not metaphorically; physically, his hands were heavy. And the deliverance of the entire people came not from Moses summoning superhuman endurance, but from two other people standing on either side of him, holding his arms up when he could no longer hold them himself. They even gave him a stone to sit down on. The strong one was allowed to sit.

If you are the Moses of your household — the one whose strength the others have leaned on — hear this. There is no shame in the arms going heavy. The faith of the story is not that Moses never tired. It’s that he let Aaron and Hur in close enough to hold him up. Your collapse is not the failure of your family’s strength. Letting yourself be held is your family’s strength, working exactly as designed. Sit on the stone. Let them take your arms.

Body practice: Let your arms drop completely. If they’ve been braced — clasped, crossed, holding your phone, gripping — let them fall heavy at your sides or rest fully on the chair’s arms so the chair, not your muscles, holds their weight. Feel how much you’ve been holding up without noticing. Breathe out long, and let something else bear the weight of your arms for thirty seconds. That handing-off is the whole prayer.

A prayer:

God, my arms have gone heavy. I’ve held them up for this household so long I forgot they could come down. I don’t want to be carried — and I cannot keep carrying. Give me the grace to let the ones beside me hold up my arms, and to sit on the stone You’ve put there. Let being held be my strength now, instead of holding. Amen.

When there’s no joy left in the house to run on

Some seasons drain not just the energy but the gladness out of a home. Nobody’s laughing. The warmth has gone out of the rooms. And you find yourself trying to manufacture morale you don’t feel, to fake a lightness for the others’ sake, which is its own exhausting labour. This verse is for the house that’s run out of joy as well as strength.

Nehemiah 8:10 (KJV)

“…neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”

This line gets printed on so many cheerful things that we’ve forgotten it was spoken to an entire weeping community. The people had just heard the law read aloud after a long brokenness, and they were sobbing — a whole gathered crowd grieving together. And the word to them, as a people, was: don’t be crushed by your sorrow, because the strength you need is not a mood you have to summon. It is the joy of the LORD — His gladness, not your manufactured cheerfulness. The strength is on loan from Him, not generated by you.

That matters enormously for a depleted household. You don’t have to fake joy for each other. You don’t have to be the morale officer of a tired house. The gladness that becomes your strength is His, given, not performed — which means even a family with no joy of its own left has access to a strength that doesn’t depend on how anyone feels tonight. Stop trying to generate the lightness. Receive it.

Body practice: This one’s gentle. Let your face go slack — most of us hold a tense, managing expression we don’t even feel, a low effortful bracing in the brow and around the eyes from keeping things together for others. Let the brow soften. Let the muscles around your eyes rest. You don’t have to hold a face for anyone right now. Breathe out, and on the exhale let go of the job of seeming okay. His joy doesn’t need your performance to arrive.

A prayer:

Lord, the joy has gone out of our house, and I’ve been trying to fake a lightness I don’t feel so the others won’t lose heart. I’m so tired of performing okay. Your word says the joy is Yours, not mine to manufacture — that Your gladness is our strength. So I stop pretending. Be the strength we cannot feel our way to tonight. Amen.

The body practice — for a household, not just a self

We’ve put a small practice under each verse, but there’s one through-line worth naming on its own, because shared exhaustion lives in shared bodies. When a household is depleted, the whole house is braced — clenched jaws at the dinner table, shoulders up in every room, everyone wound tight and restless around a thing no one will name. You cannot think a family out of a state its collective nervous system is holding it in. But you can move a household, even a little, toward release — and the strong one going first gives everyone else permission. So:

1. Lift the eyes, together if you can. The posture of 2 Chronicles 20 is a body posture — chin up, gaze out, throat open. Do it at the table, out loud: our eyes are upon thee.
2. Fall in shifts, on purpose. Name out loud, as a family, who’s having the hard day. Let one person be the one who’s down today and the others lift — and let it rotate. No one carries every day.
3. Let your arms come down. Whoever’s been the Moses — let them sit on the stone. Literally let someone else take a task, a worry, a watch tonight.
4. One long exhale, the same word. Pick one — together. Held. His joy. Our eyes. Breathe it out slowly, longer on the way out than the way in. If two of you do it at once, even better.

A note on the science

There is a real, measurable reason these small physical acts change how a person — and even a roomful of people — feels, and it has nothing to do with scripture proving anything. It’s physiology.

When a household is under sustained strain, each person is typically running a chronic sympathetic (“fight-or-flight”) load: muscles recruited and braced, jaw and neck tight, shoulders held high, the body wound up and unable to settle. This mobilisation state is metabolically expensive — it is meant to be brief, not a way of life — which is part of why a long hard season leaves a whole family so flattened.

A deliberately slow exhale, longer than the inhale, is one of the few voluntary levers any of us has on the involuntary system: lengthening the out-breath increases vagal activity, the brake of the parasympathetic (“rest and recover”) branch, producing a measurable shift toward the settled state within a few breaths rather than hours. Letting the jaw, shoulders, brow, and arms drop removes a continuous stream of muscular tension feedback the brain reads as ongoing threat — which is why the physical release usually has to come before the felt sense of calm, not after.

There is also a social layer worth naming honestly: calm is partly contagious. A nervous system that has down-shifted is read by those nearby — through tone of voice, slower breathing, an unclenched face — and can help settle theirs (this co-regulation is most pronounced between people who are closely bonded, which is exactly a household). It is not magic and not large per breath, but in a tense home, one person who genuinely settles can lower the ambient charge in the room. That is why the strong one going first is not only spiritual; it is measurable.

None of this is a claim about what God does or doesn’t do. It is simply the engineering of the bodies you were all given. The exhale is a door any of you can open from your own side.

The body-science here reflects established neuroscience of the nervous system. What the science actually says about a settled body → · the research behind these pages

Keep that box where it belongs — it explains the body, not the Bible. The verse and the vagus nerve are two true things on two different shelves. I’d rather hand you both, honestly, than weld them together and lie to you about either.

A word before you go

You came here carrying not just your own depletion but a whole household’s. So hear this plainly: the goal was never to find a verse that makes you, the strong one, push better for everyone else. The goal is to let the whole family stop — together — and put its eyes on the only One strong enough to carry what none of you can.

“Not by our own strength” is not a productivity verse for tired families. It’s the sound of God leaning in toward a frightened, depleted household — Jehoshaphat’s people, Moses with his heavy arms, a weeping crowd with no joy left — and saying, the battle is not yours, but mine. The part you’ve all been white-knuckling together, He has had His hand under the whole time. You’re allowed to lift yours off now, all of you, and see.

If you’re carrying this less as a household and more as one person who’s simply been white-knuckling it alone, the singular companion piece is for you — when pushing harder stopped working, “not by my strength, but His”. And if the end of strength has become a permanent feature you’re learning to be carried inside of rather than out of, sit with verses on God’s strength made perfect in our weakness.

Take it with you: The Held-Together Cards

I made a small free thing for exactly this — for a house that’s run out of strength as one.

[→ The Held-Together Cards: 7 Shared-Strength Verse Cards for a Household Carrying Something As One] — seven printable pocket cards, one per day, each pairing a shared-strength verse (2 Chronicles 20:12, Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, Exodus 17:11-12, Nehemiah 8:10, Psalm 25:4-5, and two more) with a single one-breath body practice the whole family can do together, and a two-line prayer in the plural. They’re sized to stand on the dinner table or stick to the fridge — so the surrender is in front of all of you before the bracing takes over again.

Send me the free cards → (enter your email; the PDF arrives straight away.)

And if the cards become something your household reaches for, they grew out of a fuller devotional we made for people who’ve been carrying too much for too long — a Stilling Waves reflective journal for the season you’re being held instead of holding see the journals →. Short daily readings, body practices, and space to write your way out of the bracing. No pressure. The free cards stand entirely on their own.

Frequently asked questions

What is the “not by our own strength” Bible verse?
The closest single verse is 2 Chronicles 20:12, where King Jehoshaphat prays for an entire nation under threat: “We have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee” (KJV). It’s the plural, communal expression of surrender — a whole people admitting together that the outcome doesn’t rest on their combined strength. The phrasing “not by our own strength” is a faithful summary of that posture rather than a word-for-word quotation.

What’s the difference between “not by my strength” and “not by our own strength”?
“Not by my strength, but His” (drawn from Zechariah 4:6) is the singular, personal version — one individual who’s been white-knuckling something alone. “Not by our own strength” is the plural, shared version — a household, marriage, family, or community out of strength together. This page is the shared one; if you’re carrying it solo, the companion piece on “not by my strength, but His” is written for that.

Is there a Bible verse for a family going through a hard time together?
Several. 2 Chronicles 20:12 (a whole people surrendering as one), Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 (the threefold cord — falling in shifts so one can lift the other), Exodus 17:11-12 (Aaron and Hur holding up Moses’ tired arms), and Nehemiah 8:10 (“the joy of the LORD is your strength,” spoken to a weeping community). Together they say the same thing: a family’s strength was never meant to be everyone at full power at once.

What does 2 Chronicles 20:12 mean?
Facing three advancing armies, King Jehoshaphat doesn’t project false confidence. In front of the whole frightened nation he admits, “we have no might… neither know we what to do,” and turns the entire people’s gaze to God: “our eyes are upon thee.” The answer he receives (verse 15) is “the battle is not yours, but God’s.” It means a community can be genuinely out of strength and out of answers, and still be carried — the outcome was never resting on their combined willpower.

Why do the body practices matter for a whole family — isn’t this just spiritual?
Because shared exhaustion isn’t only an emotional state; it’s a physical one each person’s nervous system is holding them in (clenched jaws, braced shoulders, a body that won’t settle), and tension is partly contagious in a close household. A long exhale, an unclenched face, and dropped arms can shift the underlying state — and one person who genuinely settles can lower the charge in the whole room. See the sealed science note above. The verses speak to the family’s spirit; the breath unlocks the bodies that have been bracing. Both, honestly, on their own terms.

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version (KJV), public domain. Hebrew glosses are offered lightly and only where they genuinely illuminate the plain sense; where a phrase is summarised rather than quoted, I’ve said so. Stilling Waves publishes contemplative Christian devotional journals for readers who’d rather be met than motivated.