echoes of redemption

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.

- Galatians 6:2

There are a lot of logical reasons not to carry someone’s burden.

Cost.

Time.

Stress.

And a lot of unknowns.

But when I’m honest with myself, this is the area I look the least like Christ. And sometimes it makes me wonder if I’m even a Christian.

It’s easy to talk about serving others. Easy to throw money at a problem. Easy to create a program that people should participate in.

But it’s hard to walk into someone’s life, pick up their burden and carry it for them. Owning their problems as if they are my own. Pouring the same time, energy, passion and prayer into their life as I do when my world starts to fall apart.

There are huge problems in our world, but sometimes the answer isn’t a global solution, it’s just a person deciding to make a difference.

The Church in action is people carrying one another’s burdens – and it’s beautiful. Because when we all find someone to walk along side – someone to own their problems like our own – we discover life like Christ lived it. And it’s deep, rich and more abundant than we ever knew possible.

Complacency comes when we stop challenging the norms.

It’s easy to forget that waste is a part of daily life. The average American spends more money annually on trash bags than most people in the world spend each year on all goods.

The stuff I need to get rid of the stuff I don’t need is a deeper investment than most people will ever be able to make.

It’s easy to forget when we do buy a trash can, we carry it home in a plastic bag, unwrap it, put a plastic bag into the trash can and throw away the bag we brought it home with.

So the stuff that harms the environment the greatest is the most easily discarded.

It’s easy to forget serving sizes of food have increased over the past 20 years in America. So a cup of coffee could now have 7x more calories or that McDonald’s biggest hamburger patty is 500% larger than the original.

So we’re one of the most out of shape countries in the world.

It’s easy to grow accustomed to violence in our media. So much so, a country that isn’t concerned about showing nudity on public TV became concerned enough about an American movie releasing this week to limit its showing to porn theaters.

Which impacts how we view and react to all kinds of violence – both imagined and real.

And living in a place like this changes my views of the world. About what is normal. About how things should be.

Change isn’t normal. But our world needs change.

So change starts with awareness.

A recent study of American christians showed that 1 in 4 church attendees felt “stuck in their faith.”

Globally the idea of being stuck in faith is distinctly a western thought.

Historically it is almost exclusively an idea that has built up over the past 100 years, with the past 50 as the epicenter.

Not to say you wont find people struggling to hear from God throughout the world and history – that’s a different matter. The idea of being “stuck” is that a person’s faith is taking them nowhere. God isn’t revealing anything to them and they don’t feel like they are growing in any significant way.

Scripture doesn’t have much advice for people who are stuck simply because there is an underlying assumption that every follower of Jesus will be radically involved serving others.

When a person pours their life into other people – both inside and beyond the walls of your church – the concept of “stuck” isn’t quite as likely.

Helping a single mom you met a church pay her electric bill so she can also by groceries each month somehow moves a person forward in their faith.

Going without coffee for a month to send water to an organization to build a well in Africa somehow makes a person’s faith stronger.

Trying to live faith out in private gets people stuck.

Maybe what we have today that is both distinctly western and unique to the past 100 years of history is a rise of individualism. Faith is designed to be personal. Not private.

So the best way to get the 25% of American Christians un-stuck is to get them involved serving people. Engaging with the cry of the world.

I don’t want to take a complex problem and over simplify it, but the idea of “stuck” is about lacking motion. And in the path of Jesus, serving people is the movement of love.

So let’s stay un-stuck.