The Burden of Love

You know how we (I mean we in the church) often say things like, "I am with you," and "I'll shoulder your burdens," and the like, and we may very well mean them, but after awhile it kind of feels overused, or maybe even a bit inauthentic? I've used them plenty of times before and even as the words came off my lips it felt a little cliché, even to me. I think that happens sometimes because either I'm afraid of really going there with someone right into the mud and muck of life or because I don't think it's the right thing to do. If someone is drowning in quicksand, you don't save them by jumping into it beside them.

But then I don't think that's the case anymore through Christ. I think that image is wrong, and sometimes I just say that to myself so I can feel better about keeping some kind of safe distance from the real pain of another man's circumstances. If anything, Christ is the Vine that I hold onto as I jump right into the center of the bog with my brother and hold on for dear life, if that's what it takes.

And I don't think that we can offer much if we aren't willing to go there. I'm not convinced that I can really contend for someone's heart or life or faith or anything else that's really important if I don't feel at least in a small sense the agony of that very thing lost.

When Simon from Cyrene was given Jesus' cross to carry up Calvary's hill, he felt the weight of that burden and then knew just a small piece of the pain Jesus was bearing, and was shattered by the thought of the ultimate pain he would endure. I think Jesus himself felt the loss of something so precious to him when he wept over Jerusalem while he almost whispered under his breath, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem... how often I have longed..."

I want to be a genuine man, an authentic man, in this world. I want to be real, solid real like cold stone under your feet or the blindingly real, dazzling blue of the sky or the agonizingly real feel of blood dripping from your skin like sweat in the night.

And I think I'm becoming that, slowly, as I learn to love. And it hurts.

My wife teaches me much about this. She has a way of engaging with a person’s life –friend or stranger – in such an authentic way that they often sense her love and trust their story to her. I’m blown away every time it happens, whether in the Wal-Mart check-out aisle or over the phone or over dinner. She will cry with them, or pray, or bring light and laughter in that encounter, and usually a beautiful mixture of all three. She will often leave those encounters with a burden for that person, feeling their pain, carrying it to Christ for them. And her heart is enlarged in the process.

In the end, I think all of the events, weighty with both glory and pain (and sometimes both at the same time), are leading us closer to and further into God. It's as Paul told the Corinthians, that distress led them to become more holy - that is, more God's, and that, in turn, led them to be more alive in all the ways one can be.

You let the distress bring you to God, not drive you from him. The result was all gain, no loss. Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets. And now, isn't it wonderful all the ways in which this distress has goaded you closer to God? You're more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible. Looked at from any angle, you've come out of this with purity of heart.

-2 Corinthians 7:9-11, The Message

Remember that in the Old Testament, the priests entering the Holy of Holies had to wear a rope tied around their ankles in case they were struck dead by God's holiness and had to be dragged out. After all, if they were stuck dead by entering into the place, who in their right mind would go in after them to drag out their corpses? Annie Dillard had it right when she said that, "On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return." Concerning the genuine love for others that the Spirit endows us with, I think this is accurate. Jesus has told us as much, that we are in for the ride of a lifetime.

So, even as we ride the high seas and long for the deeper depths, the tides turn and shift, the storm settles by the sound of the One speaking into the night, and our eyes adjust to the grey and misty shadows to see a figure out there walking, arm outstretched, a laugh almost bursting the seams of his smiling lips. This Wild One has invited us further out with Him, further into the burden of love. He awaits us. “He waits to be wanted,” as Tozer said. To Him and with Him we must go. In the light of His life, what else could we do?