A Load You Were Not Meant to Carry Alone

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2, WEB)

Some weights are meant to be shared, and the trouble is that we treat them as private property. Paul writes, bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. A burden here is something heavy enough that a man begins to sink under it, the kind of pull that lust and secrecy put on the soul over months and years, the sort of weight that bends a man's whole posture without anyone else seeing why. Paul says the answer is not to grit your teeth and carry more, but to let the weight be distributed, to let a brother get his shoulder under part of it so you are not crushed by what was never meant to rest on one back.

There is a strange pride in insisting on carrying everything yourself. It looks like strength and it feels like responsibility, and a man can tell himself he is sparing others the trouble. But it slowly crushes the man who does it, and the crushing is quiet enough that he mistakes it for normal life. Christ fulfilled the law by taking on what was not his to carry, the whole weight of it, and he asks us to reflect that with each other in the small and daily way we can. When you tell your team the truth about a hard week, you are not being a burden to them. You are giving them the chance to obey Christ in the most practical way there is, to put their shoulder where it belongs.

Let someone help you carry it today. Name the actual weight to one man who can be trusted with it, and watch how much lighter the same load becomes once it is no longer only yours. Ask God to soften whatever pride still calls that weakness, because it is not weakness. It is the exact thing he told you to do.