Karla Rose
Between flooding, homelessness, addiction, abuse, illness, the economy, and even the inevitable realities of aging, there are people all around us who are carrying a heavy burden around each day.
The Bible has a lot to say about how we treat people.
It asks us to consider others (Phil 2:4), be encouraging (1 Thes 5:11), use our special gifts and abilities to serve (1 Peter 4:10), participate with joy in celebrations and with grief over disappointments (Romans 12:15), work alongside (Eccl 4:9-10), help carry each other’s burdens (Gal 6:2), forgive (Eph 4:32), and to treat others how we would like to be treated (Matt 7:12).
I think we can all agree that treating others like this is good. It’s so good in fact that people who don’t know, or don’t want to know God follow these instructions too, sometimes even more successfully than Bible believing Christians.
We can see it all around us as the community rallies around those who continue to be affected by the aftereffects of the recent flooding. So the question is, how is, or how should, a Christian’s behaviour be different?
The only answer I can think of is God. While any human can offer love, a Christian also has the ability to introduce them to the God of the universe, a protector and provider with the most tender and compassionate heart, with shoulders broad enough to carry any and every load they might bring Him, who will love them when they are unlovable, who will fight for them when not even they can fight for themselves, who can free them from what crushes them and present them with a life full of passion and purpose.
The gift that comes from sharing God along with the limited portion of love we carry, rather than only giving what we personally have available for the day, is two-fold.
First, we are sharing an unextinguishable source of love, support and protection, and second, we aren’t left to carry the burden of caring on our own.
That means that when the load we are helping someone else carry grows too heavy, when we inevitably have a bad day and can’t do what we intended to, when we fail to listen, or find ourselves unable to treat people with kindness and understanding, God is there.
God can be trusted to help our friends and neighbours carry their loads while simultaneously pulling us back into alignment with Him so we have what we require to serve again.
As we get to know Him, He grows us and guides us, so that even at our worst we will, eventually, learn to make love our default.
We weren’t designed to carry crushing loads, we were designed to function in community, to serve and support each other with our special gifts, all while allowing our creator to grow and stretch us, increasing our capacity and softening our hearts so that we can treat people the way He does, and the only way to do that is to grow our relationship with God, learn who He is, who He says we are, and listen when He tells us to roll up our sleeves and get stuck in.
