You are a burden

The pastor spends a lot of time bedside, in dim hospital rooms, praying over the constant hum of daytime television. You see full-grown men in shabby floral gowns, legs exposed, dignity leaving with each spoonful of institutional yogurt they eat. You see their adult children, sitting patiently by their parent’s side. Cautiously checking their phones and tending to the real world outside, caught between this pitiful scene and their hurried life beyond its walls and fluorescent lights. You try to get people by themselves to talk, so that they can be honest (a difficult thing for a sick person to do around their loved ones). It’s a holy privilege to have these tough conversations, to provide space for people as they wrestle with what their life is becoming. With its brevity and its pain.

You hear many similar things:

“I know there are so many people who have it so much worse than I do.”

“I don’t know why God still has me here.”

“I’m just ready to be back home.”

What’s tough to see, in so many, especially in a particular type of proud and hardworking man, is the realization that they have become what they have struggled their entire life not to be: a burden to others. It’s rarely articulated beyond a sigh, but you can sense it in their body language. Is this what I’ve become?

Burden is an old English word that meant load or weight to be carried; it also meant child. And indeed, the sick and the frail are carried and strolled, pushed and cared for, much as you do for a child.

My son Charlie loves to be carried up and down the stairs. He holds up his arms and grins his large, impish grin, and never imagines himself a burden (though at the age of 3, he’s not as easy to carry as he once was). I tell him, “I’ll hold on to you, and you hold on to me. We hold on to each other.” And he loves it. To be cared for, loved, tended to, fed, and yes, carried by your parents, is a sheer delight for the child. You are a burden to your parents, and joyfully unaware that this might be a problem.

But something happens in adolescence, something terrible and essential, and we begin to rub away our parents’ kisses, if we were every lucky enough to get them. We begin to sulk and think and read. We play loud music and take on jobs. We get a girlfriend or boyfriend, we find our friends, we begin to question and doubt and pray on our own. We feel the nobility of life, its singular calling, its possibilities and fears. And in a myriad of ways, with varying levels of success, we break out on our own. And if we manage any level of independence or success, we begin to imagine that we are that very American of ideas, though it’s an ancient, Edenic temptation: a “self-made man.” To be a burden, to be in debt to another person’s work or sacrifice, to have to face the indignity of being picked up and carried by another? It’s not something many of us are willing to accept. It would feel pathetic.

And so we push the thought away. We are married, but we each have our separate bank accounts and careers and dreams. We have children, and they might depend on us, but we stand on our own. We have friends, but I’d hate to need them. We have churches, but if we had to we could go to another one. Of course this isn’t everyone, and many people never say these things out loud, or even think them. But our lives reflect this kind of thinking—especially if we are affluent and comfortable!

Until. Well, until you are the one sitting in the hospital bed, until you are the one wearing the floral gown, until you are the one waiting for someone to visit you or call you or come help you when you click the little red button for the nurse. I’ve never yet been the one on the bed, thank God. But someday I will be, and so will you. Will I be ready for it?

Here’s my observation, from my limited experience as a pastor. The people who face sickness and death with the most grace and courage are the ones who figured out they were a burden a long time ago. Long before sickness and infirmity came, they surrendered to the God who Jesus called Father, the God who “carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself” (Exodus 19:4), the God who in Christ took us on as the great burden, who loved us to the very end. Embracing a life with this God shatters any notion that I might rely on myself for what I need.

One of the secrets of the gospel, which is only a secret because we don’t like thinking about it, is that it renders us absolutely dependent upon the grace of God. It exposes our independence as a total fabrication, an illusion of the enemy, a ridiculous falsehood. The gospel urges us to scan our life, our blessings, the provision of daily food and water and air, the abundance of God’s mercies, the “natural” gifts and talents we possess, the ability to suffer and persevere, the unearned salvation in Christ that leads to eternal life, the disposition toward faith itself that makes that salvation possible, and see that it is all gift. The apostle Paul asks, “what do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Cor 4:7)

The obvious but terrible answer is: well, nothing.

Jesus says that unless you become like a little child, you will never enter the kingdom of God. I’ve always puzzled on what, exactly, he means. But I wonder if it’s that aspect of a child that loves being carried by his father, that joyful burdenhood, a contentedness in needing someone more powerful and wise than you, and trusting them to bear what you cannot bear alone. Do we acknowledge that with the joy of a child, or the grimace of the proud?

You may be successful and intelligent and healthy and well-adjusted today. I thank God if you are. But the gospel says, quite clearly, that you are and will always be a burden. One that God delights in carrying, but who will always need to be carried. May we learn this sooner, rather than later, so that we can face our days and the end of our days with grace.

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