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Weight Lifting: Lifting Beyond the Capacity of What You Can Carry

 A default mode that I have developed over the course of time is the ability to understand everyone’s perspective in a situation. This is easy for me to do because I have been doing it professionally for years but it can be physically taxing on my mindset personally.

As a person who always understands, it can be difficult to feel understood. As a person who is always giving, it can be difficult to receive. As a person who pours life into the dry places of others, it can be more than easy to wither in your own personal desert if you never ask for help. 

A hard truth is that even when you instinctively know what is bothering others, people will not always know what is bothering you. I encourage you to speak up, and if you feel unheard, voice that feeling and refuse to shut down.

Asking for help looks different for everyone. You may be able to pour your heart out to a friend, someone in your family, someone at your local church, or to a therapist. Who ever that person may be for you, reach out to them and allow yourself the freedom to release the weight of the world that you are carrying off of your shoulders. If you don’t have that person in your life at this moment, I pray that you will be able to identity them soon.

In Matthew 11:28-30, Jesus says to us, “ come to me, all who are tired from carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest. Place my yoke  over your shoulders, and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble. Then you will find rest for yourselves because my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

A yoke can be fastened to one animal or to two. It is an object that is placed around the neck of animals to keep them on track, so that the animals can help one another, to ease discomfort/ pain, and to ease the task of pulling a load.

 In John 14:16 Jesus told us that He would leave a comforter with us. Because of this comforter, the Holy Spirit, we are never alone and our burdens will never be impossible for us to conquer when we enlist His help..

 Consider this:

·      What task have you been fighting to complete and it is now a burden because you have not humbled yourself to ask the Lord for help?

·      What/ who are you holding on to that you have struggled to release?

 Remember that you are a spirit being that is having a human experience. Don’t hold your emotions in and release the people, places and things that only God can correct. 

I want to remind you that you are not alone and to trust God with your emotional nakedness. I also would like to remind you that you are not called to carry the emotional weights of others despite understanding their predicament. Take the time to release the emotional heaviness that you carry in place of ignoring your own needs to make sure that others are good. 

Lord, I pour my heart out to you. Expose the things that I have attempted to keep secret from you, and help me to not feel alone or understood as I continue to understand others.  You are my safe place and the lover of my soul. Thank you for your ear, for bottling up my tears when I didn’t have the words to coney my emotions, and for being present, especially in this very moment. In Jesus name amen. 

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