Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Matthew 11:28-30

My burden is easy, my yoke is so light.

So this made me think of the entry I wrote just before Advent started up again. At the end I asked: if you go out into the world with a sincere desire and willingly put in the effort to serve God, is it impossible not to come up with good returns? It's a bit more elegantly put in there than here, but you get the idea.

It flies in the face of the saying - the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And, well, maybe it is if it's good intentions that you didn't act on with care and love for your fellow man.

But maybe the main reason that God is always trying to tell us, all but beg us, to follow His path, to think not as the world thinks but as He does, to love Him and our fellow man through Him (you know, for those people we would have a lot of trouble loving in themselves), because that's the only way we'd make it. That's the only way we'll keep from breaking ourselves into pieces, damaging our souls beyond repair.

I think of how many stories of someone horrified at the damage they have unwittingly caused, the stories of people who destroyed themselves with their selfish loves or selfish desires for money/success/etc. Only by thinking of others do we keep from destroying others and in the process ourselves.

Perhaps that's what He means by His burden being light. We don't have the weight of our inevitable failure on our heads. We follow God, we are led by Him. We see not as the world sees but as God sees. We put our fellow man first.

And in doing so, we keep ourselves from so much pain.

He really must love us.