I Came Home Heavier

She started weighing it in the car, because she is that sort of woman and because it had gone on long enough.

Not literally. Marva has a way of doing arithmetic on things that do not have numbers, and one Sunday in the autumn she decided to be honest about the exchange.

What she carries in: a hard week, a son she is worried about, tiredness.

What she carries out: all of that, unchanged, plus four new things she is now conscious of not doing.

She did it three Sundays running and it came out the same every time.

Nobody in that building has done anything wrong. She wants to be clear about that, because she loves those people and the man who preaches is a good man who prays for her by name. There is no bullying and no manipulation and the coffee is good and somebody always asks about her son.

It is simply that everything she hears arrives as something for her to do.

Not because it is said that way. Some of it is not said that way at all. It is that her ears have been trained by about thirty years of it, and now every message that comes in gets stripped for the part that applies to her, and the part that applies to her is always a task.

So she claps at the end. She means the clapping. And she picks up her bag and goes out into the car park with four more items than she had at half past ten.

She is fifty-eight and she has stopped expecting anything else.

That is the part she said out loud in the car in November, and it frightened her. Not the heaviness. The stopping expecting.

Because a woman who has stopped expecting to be given anything will keep going faithfully for another twenty years and never once put her hands out.

And you may know that car park. You may have done your own arithmetic, and you may have got the same answer three weeks running.

He weighed His own and told us what it came to

Take this off before anything else, because you have carried it into that building and out of it for thirty years and it was never yours.

You are not a bad receiver. You never were. Scripture has Jesus naming the weight of His own yoke out loud, and the number He gives is not the one you have been carrying, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your effort at hearing better, who hands a person rest. Set it down here in the car. It is heavy and it has been on the passenger seat since November.

Now hear what He says, and hear that He is describing the weight.

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.Matthew 11:30

He is not saying there is nothing to carry. There is a yoke in the sentence and He says so plainly.

He is telling you what it weighs.

And the reason He is telling you is the verses just before it, where He calls people who are weary and heavy laden and offers them rest, and then says take mine instead, because mine is light.

Which means that if what you are carrying out of a room is heavier than what you carried in, the arithmetic you did in November has found something, and what it has found is not that you are failing. It is that something has been loaded on you that He did not weigh out.

You are meant to be handed something light. Right now, this Sunday, at fifty-eight, with a son you are worried about. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does the handing, and He has never once sent a woman out of a room with four extra items.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch here and I am not putting you in it.

Nothing here is a complaint about your church or the man who preaches. He prays for you by name and he is a good man, and Scripture is full of instruction and none of it is unkind, and a church that never asks anything of anybody is not a kindness either.

And nothing here says the four items are false. They are probably good things. Most of them are.

The point is only the weight, and where the stripping happens, and that a woman who has been at it thirty years hears an instruction in a sentence that was not carrying one.

Here is the tender part. The thing that frightened you in the car was right to frighten you.

Not the heaviness. Heaviness is survivable and you have survived it. The stopping expecting is the one that does the long damage, because a woman who no longer expects to be given anything stops putting her hands out, and hands that never go out stay closed even when something is being held toward them.

His word says His burden is light, and His Spirit is the one who carries what is heavy, and neither of them ever asked you to arrive at the car with more than you came with.