It was never your burden to carry.
Sometimes we struggle with something in our lives. Maybe it’s for a few hours, a few days. Maybe it’s even been years. I don’t know if you’re struggling with an addiction, with anxiety, with depression, with your health; whatever it is. And you feel like God isn’t there in that situation. You find yourself asking questions like, “Why aren’t You helping me?”. You have this sense of hopelessness.
A few weeks back, I had a complete breakdown. I’ve been struggling with something for over two years and I’ve tried everything to make it work but nothing ever seemed to change. I felt like God had abandoned me; left me on my own to stumble along. And there, in the middle of my breakdown; when I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore, God spoke to me. “It was never your burden to carry”. I had been trying and trying to get through this relying on myself, my own abilities. We were never meant to carry the burden of our problems. We were never meant to handle everything on our own. God doesn’t want us to struggle. It’s not His heart. He says, “Come to Me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). He wants us to come to Him and give Him our struggle and He will give us rest; He will give us Peace.
One verse that God gave me in that moment was Psalm 55:22 which says, “Cast your burdens on the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never let the righteous be shaken”. What stuck out for me was the word ‘cast’. In the dictionary, cast means to ‘throw or to fling’. You know that feeling when you’ve been carrying something heavy around and when you finally have the chance to put it down (or fling it away), you just feel lighter. When you cast your burdens on the Lord, we throw the heaviness off of our shoulders and onto His. We feel lighter. Another word that stuck out was ‘burden’. The word burden means ‘a load or something that leaves you distressed and worried’. In Greek, the word for burden is ‘phortion’ (pronounced Forsio), meaning ‘troubles of life’. That same word also describes “man’s load of imperfections”. So, not only can we throw our struggles on the Lord, but we can also throw our imperfections on Him. Any lack, any failure, we can give it all to Him and receive His rest, His peace, His lightness. ‘And He will sustain you’. That word sustain, in the dictionary, means that He will encourage you. He will strengthen you and comfort you.
Think about something that you’ve been struggling with; something that’s left you feeling burdened, feeling worried and cast it all on Him ‘for He cares for you’ (1 Peter 5:7).
-Abigail W