Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Casting Our Burdens

“Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.” – Psalm 55:22

Thomas Merton writes, “A life that has nothing but a straight line towards the grave and a lot of little circular lines to forget the grave as you travel towards the grave is a life of care, and it is a life of ever-increasing care and it is a life of frustration and it is a life of futility.” David implies that this is our default way of living. We tend to carry our worries with us, to be sustained by our own efforts rather than by God. We tend to be moved about, rocked up and down by circumstances, leaning upon what is unstable.

It is quite marvelous, if you think about it, that God makes this promise. That he offers not to merely help us along, but to take our burdens entirely upon Himself. But we have to do something. We have to look up from all those little circular lines, see beyond them to God and the promise we have, take hold of our burdens, and cast them upon Him. Casting is a decisive movement. This word is used of throwing away something you don’t intend to retrieve later: Joseph’s brothers casting him into the pit, Pharaoh ordering infants to be cast into the Nile, the Israelites casting gold into the fire to make the golden calf. 

Casting is an act of trust (verse 23), a recognition that it is God who sustains us, who has the power to permit something or not, who keep us from being moved. Casting brings a new kind of vision: a peering into both eternity and the spiritual realities of our day-to-day. The latter half of this verse is literally, “He will not give moving forever to the righteous.” There is an eternal and permanent stability available to us, one that frees us from inner restlessness, anguish, or fear (verses 2-5). When we see life as so far beyond that line to the grave, when we stop fixating on day-to-day anxieties, we begin to see these kinds of truths. Merton writes that the opacities begin to fall away so that the transparency of God can shine through. “Humble yourselves,” Peter writes, “under the mighty hand of God… casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.” 

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