Taking the burdens you currently carry and makingthem much, much lighter. It’s about transferring theweight of your responsibilities from the weak shoulders ofyour flesh to the strong fingertips of God. It’s about livingin deep-down, heart-level freedom. This is more likeaseries of personal reflections on what it’s like to strugglewith heavy baggage and more important, what it’s like torelease weight of that baggage to someone much morecapable of handling it. These words express the deep wrestling of a lifetime.
I remember the feeling clearly.
I had justcompleted a very difficult term and was driving home fromhigh school with an entire summer ahead of me. Therewere no more oppressive exams or papers hanging overmy head, no messy relationship issues lingering in thebackground, no financial pressures in the foreseeablefuture, no nagging health problems. The windows wererolled down, and the fresh air of early summer washedover me at highway speed. Life felt good. In a way, it’s sadthat I can remember that particular moment so manyyears ago.
I wish it was one of many such moments, but itwas unique – a vestige of childhood and I haven’t felt thatway since.
That’s why it sticks out in my memory. It wasavery rare exception to normal life. I want the feeling back.Ididn’t have it very often in childhood, and I certainlyhaven’t had it since that summer break in high school. Butit seems to me that this is how we were designed to livewith hearts that aren’t stressed out by the burdens of lifebut are free to soar and enjoy and dream.
We feel alivewhen we aren’t weighed down by burdens, and we instinctively know something’s wrong when we are. It seems thatwe have an inherent desire to go through life weightlessly.
Every desire to unwind, to dream about the day, tolaugh and forget about the demands on your life foramoment – it’s all a hint of that craving to be as free as Godintended for you to be. You want; we all want to live without feeling like we’re under extreme pressure. Though lifein a broken world is full of concerns and problems, the”Good News” is supposed to be actually be good. Thereare answers. There’s a better way to live. Through God’spromises and the hope and faith he stirs up within us, wecan have a level of freedom that people who don’t knowhim can’t have. We are called “overcomers” and “morethan conquerors” for a reason. No matter how heavy theweights on our shoulders, we can’t ultimately be defeated by them.