Each of you, you see, will have to carry your own load. [Galatians 6:5 (NTE)]
After saying we must carry each other’s burdens, the Apostle Paul seems to reverse himself three sentences later when he tells us we each must carry our own loads. It’s confusing; if we’re all supposed to carry our own loads, then nobody should need help carrying their burdens!
A few sentences previous to these verses, however, Paul encourages the Galatian church to follow the Spirit’s lead in their lives and now he’s explaining how walking in the Spirit actually looks—carrying one another’s burdens and carrying our own load. The Greek word Paul used for load was phortion, meaning load or cargo, and it was the word used for a marching soldier’s pack. Paul used the word figuratively to speak of the general responsibilities of life which we all have to bear. Like a soldier’s pack, this load is neither excessively heavy nor difficult to carry. In contrast to the oppressive burden of the Law demanded by the Pharisees, this load is the same phortion Jesus assigned to His followers. Things like discipleship, loving others, and forgiving one another are our load or phortion—obligations for which we alone are responsible.
When Paul wrote of carrying one another’s burdens a few sentences earlier, however, he used the Greek word baros, meaning something extremely heavy. Unlike a soldier’s pack, a baros is a crushing load too heavy for one person to bear alone. Baros was the word Paul used when describing the crushing weight that “was far too heavy for us; it got to the point where we gave up on life itself,” in 2 Corinthians 1:8. It is burdens like his that we are called to carry for one another.
When I was a girl, Christmas seals were sent to us as a method of fundraising by Father Flanagan’s Boys Town. The story behind the picture on those stamps illustrates baros and phortion. A young boy named Howard was abandoned at Boys Town shortly after it opened in 1917. Having had polio, he wore heavy leg braces and couldn’t negotiate the staircases so the bigger boys carried him up and down the stairs. When Father Flanagan asked one of the boys if carrying Howard was hard, the answer was, “He ain’t heavy, Father, he’s my brother!” Years later, those words, accompanied by a photo of the two boys, became the organization’s logo. The burden of going up and down stairs was too great for Howard to bear alone. Because it was a baros, the other boys carried him. On the other hand, Howard was fully capable of doing his school work and helping the younger boys. Had he not done so, he would have failed to carry his own phortion.
While each of us is responsible for fulfilling our Christian duties by carrying our own phortions, one of those duties is to carry another person’s baros! It won’t seem heavy because we’ll be carrying our brother!
My father had what’s often described as a Type-A personality. An impatient workaholic, he always took on more than he could handle. Life, for him, was one crucial task after another, none of which anyone else could do, at least not correctly. Always in a hurry, he never wanted to stop for anything, even when his gas gauge read precariously close to empty. Something more pressing always took precedence over a brief stop for gas. As a result, his car was often left on the roadside while he trudged off with a gas can to find the nearest service station. Instead of saving time, his refusal to stop cost him time. Living that way actually cost him his life; he died of a massive coronary at the age of fifty-six. It’s often been said that your in-box still will be full when you die and, indeed, his was. None of us can accomplish everything on our to-do list and we may well destroy both our relationships and ourselves while trying.
Our pastor recently did a sermon series called “Following Jesus” which reminded me of our first time backcountry skiing in Colorado more than forty years ago. As novices, we knew enough not to venture into the wilderness by ourselves so we hired Wyatt to be our guide. Insisting we delay our trek several days until we’d acclimated to the high altitude and were ready for such a trip, he gave us a long list of items we had to carry in our packs. When I asked why we needed all the survival gear along with additional food, water, and clothing, he said we had to be prepared to spend the night. Protesting that I didn’t want to spend the night out in the cold and snow, he explained, “Neither do I, but we better be prepared to do it.”
When my little grands came to play, I’d dig out the Fisher-Price “little people” village that had been their parents. Being from the early 70s, it included a free standing phone booth and I had to explain what it was and why pay phones were necessary. Phone booths are so scarce now that I suspect Superman needs to find another changing room! I can’t remember when last I dialed a phone, let alone filled a fountain pen, used carbon paper or even a typewriter. Mimeograph machines, 45s, rabbit-ear antennas, 8-track, VHS, and cassette tapes are all long forgotten. 35 mm film has been replaced by digital technology, dictionaries by spell check, and that cumbersome 26 volume encyclopedia by search engines. If you don’t understand my references, you probably don’t have a landline phone or use an alarm clock, address book, pocket calendar or travel agent. You stream your music rather than play CDs, use a GPS rather than maps, and get your news on the Internet! It’s amazing how many things have become antiquated in just my lifetime. There is, however, one thing that hasn’t become obsolete in 3,500 years: the Bible!
When Alexander the Great’s army was advancing on Persia, his troops were so weighted down by the spoils of war they’d taken in earlier campaigns that they moved too slowly to be effective in combat. At one critical point, it seemed that defeat was inevitable. As much as the greedy Alexander desired the silver, gold, and other treasures they’d pillaged, he ordered that all the plunder be thrown into a heap, burned, and left behind. Although his troops complained bitterly, they did as directed. Once unencumbered by the excess weight of their treasure, his army saw the wisdom of Alexander’s command when their campaign turned from impending defeat to victory. “It was as if wings had been given to them—they walked lightly again,” said one historian.
Since we’ll be held accountable for our words, I wondered how many words that might be. In 1984, Gyles Brandreth claimed that by the time a typical American dies, he (or she) will have uttered more than 860 million words. Since Brandreth is an actor, writer, and Scrabble fanatic rather than a scientist, his number seems questionable. In 2006, Louann Brizendine claimed that women speak an average of 20,000 words per day while men speak a mere 7,000. Based on her numbers, in a lifetime of seventy years, women would have to account for over 511 million words while men would answer for about 179 million. While Brizendine’s qualifications as a neuro-psychiatrist lend credence to her statements, she provided no source for her statistics. Skeptical of her lopsided numbers, psychology professor James Pennebaker conducted a systematic study in 2007 that recorded the daily conversational word output of both men and women. He found that women averaged 16,215 words a day and men 15,669. Based on his numbers, both men and women will speak well over 400 million words in a seventy-year lifetime.
Devotions of the Heart 