carry me

There is sadness in our lives; tragedy. I think I have seen my family cry more tears in the past 3 months than I have ever seen them cry in all the months before. I have often felt like Job. Like Satan is just waiting for me to crack, to curse God and be done with it all. But I refuse, and so does my family. Instead, I, in one of the most difficult times of my life, have found myself being more thankful than I ever remember being before. I am thankful for each day, for each moment with family, for each breath; thankful for warmth and good friends, thankful that I have a God who is the God of all comfort and thankful that He blesses those who mourn.  

I don’t know how my heart got to this point. It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. And yet here I am, at peace; thankful. It has to be God’s doing, because I know that my normal inclination in difficult times isn’t to sing praises to God or thank Him for all that He has given me. This optimism; this thankfulness; this humility has come from a power that is outside me. And maybe that’s what makes it so wonderful. Maybe the fact that I know it is not my own doing is what makes it so utterly easy. I think that is what Jesus is talking about when He says, “Come to me all you who are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” He’s saying, “Stop trying, stop trying to pull the weight on your own. Instead take my yoke, which is easy, and my burden, which is light, and just let Me carry you’. I don’t I ever really understood what Jesus was talking about in that passage until this moment. I almost thought that maybe that passage was interpreted wrong, or maybe I didn’t have enough wisdom to understand it, because being a Christian had never seemed easy to me. But that’s because this whole time I had been trying to do it all on my own. I have a habit of that, of not delegating and taking advantage of the wonderful help that people offer me. Maybe it’s a humility issue, I don’t know, but I just always felt like I was putting someone out, like asking for help so often meant that they would get sick of me and just... not be around anymore.


But God’s not like that, and honestly I don’t think most people are like that either, at least your friends shouldn't be like that. We need to believe that every heart has the capacity for compassion, otherwise we’ll be stuck in pits of despair trying to deal with everything on our own instead of sharing our burdens with one another like Paul instructs us to in Galatians 6.


And we need to believe that Jesus was telling the truth when He said that His yoke is easy and His burden is light. We need to believe that He wants to walk with us and to carry us in times of despair. We need to be willing to be real, raw, and vulnerable with one another. We need to believe that old Footprints poem.
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Footprints in the Sand

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky. In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only.

This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I could see only one set of footprints, so I said to the Lord, “You promised me Lord, that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?”


The Lord replied, “The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when I carried you.”

Mary Stevenson, 1936

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