August 25

“Many Christians love God’s will in the abstract but carry great burdens in connection with it.  From this there is deliverance in the wonderful life of faith, for in this life no burdens are carried, no anxieties felt.  The Lord is our Burden-bearer, and on Him we must lay every care.”  Hannah Whitall Smith, God is Enough, 8/25

We must lay every care.....for me this means I must even lay the burden of my continual attempt to lay my burdens at Jesus’ feet!  This may sound strange to some of you, but for me it is a real burden.  You’d think it would just be a matter of setting something down--but this is a burden in itself if it does not come easily.  I guess that is the burden of an overly responsible person.  Just when I think I’ve given everything over to the Lord the responsible side of me begins to question my decision with very logical statements.  The last thing a responsible person wants to be is irresponsible and how can I be sure that’s not what I’m being if I give the responsibility to someone else!  I see now how I’ve been fighting God all along.  But now He’s grabbed both my hands, crossing my arms upon my chest, and has spun me around to look fully into His wonderful face, as He hugs me close to Him.

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

March 30

“...they could have had no power at all against him unless God had permitted it, so I am able to look entirely away from “second causes” and to receive all that has come to us from the hands of God, and to say continually ‘Thy will be done.’”  Hannah Whitall Smith, Safe Within Your Love, pg. 120

I found myself struggling with something beyond my control and realizing I’d stopped trusting it to God’s care.  I spoke to the person involved and felt some release from my anxiety but I knew in my heart that this feeling of peace was temporary.  I knew I would take the matter back into my own hands--into my own heart--if this person did this thing again.  And then I read Hannah’s words she’d written in a letter in 1876 following her husband’s fall from public grace due to scandalous charges.  He was to never recover and died in 1898 a broken man.  Yet Hannah continued to write of God’s comfort and perfect will until her death in 1911.  This is what I was neglecting to see in my circumstance--that by thinking I must turn something over to the Lord I was denying the fact that God had permitted this thing in the first place and therefore it was never mine to begin with.  The burden I was feeling was one I’d taken upon myself.  My sin wasn’t in my inability to let it go, but in thinking it was mine at all.

“Cast your burden (what he has given you*) on the LORD, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.”  Psalm 55:22

*footnote in Harper Study Bible, RSV