Lingering Burdens Can Linger For A Purpose

​I recently heard Pastor Rich Wilkerson Jr. say, "Many times your burden is actually your assignment. The very thing that is moving your heart, the very thing that feels like frustration, is actually vision in disguise. God is telling you that I put you on the earth to solve that."

I am thinking this morning that God always wants to ease my burdens, but maybe not to the point that I will stop feeling them as an assignment.

Over the last six years or so, I have come here each morning to write. Many times about things that burden me. Mainly because writing has become my greatest source of therapy and healing.

In saying that, maybe you have wondered then what I sometimes wonder out loud to God: "I've written about this long enough now, God, shouldn't I be healed?"

This morning I am hearing God's answer: "This is no longer about just YOUR healing."

Last week I wrote about wisdom. And how I wouldn't trade it for anything in this world. But I confess while writing that I was celebrating wisdom as my own personal gift from God. My gift to keep. This morning I can hear God scolding me: "Foolish child of mine, wisdom is not your gift to treasure, it is your gift to share."

What if God doesn't just redeem our mistakes by teaching us through them? What if he redeems them by allowing that wisdom to become a gift to someone else.

Or maybe it's even stronger than that. Maybe he's not just allowing it, but DEMANDING it. Maybe these burdens that carrying on in my life aren't God's unfinished business in me, but God's unfinished business in someone's life he's calling me to touch.

I often write and speak and teach about the burden of loneliness. It has been a suffering of mine throughout my entire life. Wisdom has helped me identify that the last decade. To work on it. And yet, it still shows up from time to time.

When I write that or say it out loud I see and feel heads shaking out there as if to say, "I get it." The head shakes sadden me, this shared loneliness, but they also remind me that God has given me this problem to solve.

Sometimes lingering burdens are not signs of an invisible God but of a God standing right in from of us - with outreached hand - saying, let's go.

We have work to do.

If you are feeling burdened this morning by a burden that feels like it is never going to go away, consider the possibility that it's not supposed to go away.

Consider the possibility that yours is not a burden to bear, but a burden to share.