“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30 NIV)
I'm willing to bet that if I started an online group called "Come, Weary People," I'd have 100 members in a day...if it took that long.
We are weary people. We are sleep-deprived and tired, but weariness goes beyond that. Weariness goes deeper. Weariness is the slumped shoulders of our souls.
When Jesus called the weary, He wasn't just calling people who needed a nap or a good night's sleep.
He was calling the burdened. The laboring. The heavy-laden. The struggling.
He used agricultural imagery, as He often did, because that's what made sense to His audience. When He talked of burdens and yokes, He brought to His hearers' minds images of farm animals struggling under the weight of loads too heavy for them to bear on their own.
One of the many beauties of Jesus' teaching tools, though, is that they work for us today, whether or not we have any connection to an agricultural lifestyle. We can easily picture ourselves bent over by a too-heavy load we're trying, wearily, to carry.
Loads of responsibility and worry and guilt and fear and uncertainty and grief.
But Jesus was not just rounding up a group of weary people who could commiserate with each other. His call was not, "Come, all you who are weary...." His call was, "Come to me"—and that makes all the difference.
"Come to me," Jesus said. If I come to my friends or my husband or my children or my parents or my Bible study sisters or my church family with my wearying load, they will not entirely be able to lift it. They love me. They will want to help. They will try to help. They will do what they can. But they will not be able to fully lift it because they are carrying their own loads. Their own yokes are hard and their burdens are heavy.
"Come to me...and you will find rest for your souls." Maybe I realize I cannot come with my load to my friends and family, so maybe I "come" with it to other things I hope can lift it. A change of schedule or a vacation or some product I buy that I hope will make life easier. But Jesus was and is not just offering rest for physical bodies; He was and is offering rest for eternal souls.
"Come." I have to do my part by responding to Jesus' invitation. I have to come to Him in prayer, in study, in worship, in fellowship, in letting-go.
"To me." I have to come to Jesus, not to some other supposed burden-bearer.
"Find rest for your souls." I have to come to Jesus looking not for a quick catnap that will temporarily lift the heaviness from my head but for a deep rest that will eternally lift the heaviness from my soul. And it will not be lifted because I have rested up and gotten better at carrying it myself; it will be lifted because Jesus, God of the Weary, is carrying it for me.
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I'd love to hear from you! Feel free to tell me what you really think. Years ago, I explained to my then-two-year-old that my appointment with a counselor was "sort of like going to a doctor who will help me be a better mommy." Without blinking, she replied, "You'd better go every day." All of which is just to say I've spent some time in the school of brutal honesty!