Summer has arrived with Ontario strawberries, sweet and juicy enough to stain your chin red.
With school-age children at home, summer always shifts our daily rhythms. This year, summer isn’t the dislocation of years past, but it does mean the days feel even more interrupted, the work even more intermittent. I’m struggling to finish the work for my August graduate residency while also heeding the schedule for my upcoming book deadline. (December 1st—Did I tell you?)
This summer, we’re so grateful to be able to travel to the States to visit our families. (It’s one reason Post Script is going on vacation from July 26-August 16). This cross-border travel necessitates lots of paperwork and various COVID tests. None of this is onerous by itself—but the whole of it? Sometimes it can feel like one more Sisyphean stone to roll up the mountain of today. It’s not life as crisis: but life as perpetual burden.
Yes, the dishwasher must be unloaded—again. Yes, your people are getting hungry—again. Yes, Monday morning is happening—again.
Burden is a word that I’ve thought lots about in recent years. (My friend, Christina Crook, is releasing a book in September called Good Burdens: How to Live Joyfully in the Digital Age.) I love this idea that burdens are necessary, good even. As I tried teasing out in Keeping Place, the gospel reminds us that Jesus carried burdens in order that we may receive his benefits.
One temptation we all face is wanting a world like Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, a world in which we get benefits without burdens. But we can’t have this world if we want to follow in the Way of Jesus.
Burdens are necessary. And burdens are also hard. And some days, you just don’t know if you can swish out the toilet, clean up after the dog, fill the empty refrigerator, chip away at a deadline, reach out to a neighbor, show up to church, answer another email, mow the lawn, pray.
Burdens, big and small, can bend us low. I was feeling this recently when I read Psalm 145:14 in the New Living Translation: “The LORD . . . lifts those bent beneath their loads” (NLT). If you’re an ESV reader, you may recognize this verse as, “The LORD . . . raises up all who are bowed down” (ESV).
In this verse, I was struck by the action of God. He doesn’t lift the burdens from the backs of those bent low. No, he lifts the people carrying the loads.
This is to say: a lot of burdens don’t get lifted from us. We have to keep at the daily tedium of loving our roommates, parenting our children, cleaning our apartments, being a good neighbor, nurturing our spiritual lives. But when all that feels like a burden, guess what happens?
God lifts you up. Pours his own life into you. Gives you energy for the work of love. Like the prophet Isaiah put it, “They who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”
As you carry your burdens today, may you sense you’re lifted and carried by the Lord.
Jen