What's Your Load?

I thought about this on the way home from work.

I have tons of emotional baggage. Correction: I used to have tons of emotional baggage. Jesus offered to take it away a long time ago. That baggage contains my sins, my failures, my own evil thoughts, as well as good thoughts gone wrong, attempts to do good that turned out okay but not quite the way I would have liked. I could go on for hours. Worries are also included in that strange pile of junk. Everything in that junk has a different size, a different shape, and a different weight. What a load of junk!

What's worse is that sometimes things get tossed in on top of that mess and I have to haul that along with everything else! It's junk, no better than a wheelbarrow full of drywall debris or garbage. I could, if I wanted to, load up with all that baggage each day of the rest of my life.

Or I could live without it.

What if I could load up one just one thing, and it never changed? Jesus tells us that whoever follows him must "deny himself, take up his cross and follow" but is that so bad? A cross is a pair of wood beams that is fastened together. It has a definite size, a definite shape, and a definite weight. That size, shape, and weight does not vary or change.

Tell me what you would rather do: haul all that emotional baggage and junk, or just two pieces of wood. It isn't always easy to carry, but it never gets any bigger or any heavier.

It brings new meaning to this other thing that Jesus said:

Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

The inverted life is a life that is free from emotional baggage and sin. Living in freedom from sin means I have to carry a burden called "responsibility." Is that so hard?

The Boundary

Have you ever gone "over the line?" or felt that somebody else "crossed the line" when they said something or did something to you? Maybe that person did not do something directly to you, but to somebody you knew. But whatever the reason, suddenly you were offended and you reacted. Reactions for me come in all shapes and sizes. Recently, I learned a life lesson.

It comes from Romans 12:18 which basically amounts to this:

Whatever you do, and whatever anybody else does to you, try your best to manage your end of things. Try your best not to fight when somebody else starts it, and try your best not to start any fights.

Although Paul's letter to the Romans does not say it in so many words, I think that's basically what it means: try to avoid fighting and arguments.

I found another interesting quote last year: "The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress." Joseph Joubert, a French moral philosopher who lived between 1754 and 1824 said that.

What I try to live in the verse from Romans holds me to a very high standard, one that I cannot follow myself. But what if I do fail? I guess that's where the second quote comes in. Nothing I fight over should be anything that is not worth fighting over. And I should not be fighting to get the last word, or to be the winner. I think Paul would agree that I should be fighting to make a situation better, not worse.

The life lesson I learned recently is this: anybody might "cross the line," by doing or saying something offensive, but the inverted life is one where I can choose to move my personal boundaries. This has changed my part of what I think it means to forgive.