Cast Your Burden on the LORD

You have carried it alone because handing it over would be admitting you cannot manage it, and admitting that has a cost you have decided not to pay.

The psalm this comes from is a betrayal psalm, and it is specific. It was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company. That is who wrote the line about casting your burden: a man whose burden was a friend.

And the word he uses is not the word for a sack. It is nearer to what has been given you, your allotment, the thing that fell to you rather than the thing you picked up. Which is a fair description of most of what actually weighs: a diagnosis handed to somebody you love, a bill with a date on it, a family you did not choose. Then sustain, which means to hold up and to keep supplying, the verb for provisioning someone through a famine. He does not promise the weight evaporates. He promises a carrier who does not tire.

So say it on the drive in, one sentence, no polish. This one is yours. I cannot hold it.

Then go and do the next thing on the list, and expect to still feel it at noon. Feeling a weight and being crushed under it are not the same experience, and the psalm only ever ruled out the second.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 356 is As I Live (Ezekiel 33:11).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna