The Trash We Cling To

Our associate pastor talked this weekend about giving our burdens to Jesus. Letting Him carry them for us.

As he spoke, I thought of the mountain of rubbish my children create and give to me. Stacks of paper sculptures and paper airplanes and paper “fortune tellers” Alex and Nicholas have been making to amuse themselves. The reams of scribbled worksheets that come home from preschool. Alex no longer expects us to cherish every scrap of paper. He knows the bulk of his school work is looked over and then recycled as printer paper. If we didn’t, there soon wouldn’t be room for us in our house.

It occurred to me that when we give our burdens to Jesus, the same applies. Most of what we carry around is trash, pointless to hang on to and taking up emotional space we don’t have. My bet is Jesus doesn’t really carry our burdens. I think He does the same thing with our emotional baggage that we do with our children’s physical refuse. He throws it away, because it’s not worth hanging on to.