The hurting is everywhere. The pain endless. The horrors or humblings often told. From CNN to newsfeed posts. Burdens. Broken. Broadcasted.
Twitter. Instagram. Blogs. Facebook. NewsTV. Gossip. Viral Fame.
Instantly share experience, instantly share empathy. Horrifying shock to heartbreaking story.
I was talking with a friend last week, noting our tension with having or using or removing our Facebook account (I know, same story...) But our conversation took an unusual turn. We started talking less about our need for connection or use of viral community or perception of so-called "friends" - the usual banter that revolves around this media. And moreso, noted how much heavy is shared... There's a posting about a couple who lost a baby, or a child who has luekiemia. About prayers for a strangers story, or a school child home with the flu... Every burden is noted, every personal heartbreak now a social situation.
It reminded me of a conversation a couple months ago where a friend was reading a stranger's blog and had drawn up an entire conclusion as well as burden from holes and innuendoes that were written. And, she had taken on the weight of it. Worried, prayed, distressed, agnoized. Over someone's life that was far removed and not intertwined with her own. Yet she had taken on the load of it to her core.
There is something to ponder here -- this sharing of emotion, personal turned public news, and the burdens that it heaves on life as created creatures.
As the Church existed under Bible times and until the last century, people knew only what was in their circles. Only what they could do something about. Now, with constant social media and twentyfour hour worldwide news, we stay up-to-date with humans and hardships multiple times removed from our daily life. Surely as finite beings, we weren't made nor meant to take on all the world's hurt and hardships.
Colossians 3:13 and Ephesians 4:2 both implore "bear with each other..." The epistles are full of passages, markings, and experiences of the First Church stepping in to help their fellows in need. I have to pause and wonder what then, as finite beings, we were made for in this conversation of community as well as burden-sharing. And I resolve that we can, and are called to, walk with those in our circle, in our sphere of impact, and then leave the majority of the weight of others to those who can carry their load too.
If we carry our own burdens but let no one walk with us, the weight of that cross is crushing. If we try to compel ourselves carry everyone's burdens, the weight of that cross crushes us all too. Perhaps instead, if we share the weight of our own community, they lighten our load and we lighten theirs in a way that spreads the weight healthily. Sara Grove's has a song based on a Rwandan proverb, the chorus writes: "Every burden I have carried, Every joy -- its understood. Life with you is half as hard, And twice as good." Perhaps this is the picture of shared experience, shared joy, we are all looking for. (wrote about this in previous blog: The Cot).
Perhaps instead of broadcast news, in lei of posting instant status', or in place of reading another filtered blog, we should refocus our needs and energies, our burdens and blessings in our own homes and human hearts around us. Perhaps we would all feel a little less heavy, a little less guilty, a little less lonely, and a little more connected, a little more fulfilled, a little more loved, if our empathy, sympathy, and energy were cultivated and contained in a smaller community, within a circle we could help carry and care for.
Now I know enough to step back and note that there is a fine space between knowledge and emotion, between ignorance and apathy. There's broad gray areas where cutting off all concern for people outside of your community is hardened, ignorant, and can be selfish. But perhaps pausing to filter where and why we gather information can help lessen the fog. For there is a space where information impacts innocence to bring important insight, but that can either instigate change and a call to community, or leave a trail of chosen ignorance or elusive grief. Herein lies the question to filter: is the purpose of inputting knowledge and gaining information to evoke justice, change, and community, or to burden, weigh, and rumor?
For, this noted, we should be attune to starvation, to orphans, to genocide, to widows. We should support organizations and people who are on the ground floor to step into the lives of those hurting.
But we cannot all do it. We cannot all lessen every burden, we cannot all tend to every sickness, we cannot all hear every horror, we cannot all mend every heartache. We cannot all take on the world.
Only He could do it. Only He can take on the world. Only He is strong enough to carry all the burdens. Only He knows the empathy of each heart ache. Only He is at the side of every hurting human. Christ. He is the Christ. He is the suffering servant who knows the weight of glory and the cross and all human pain. Only He can take on the world.
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** This is not to write or make statements against helping a broader world in need. It is not an argument to turn a blind eye to widows or orphans, or genocides or starving. It is not prose against media as a whole. It is, instead, simply to start thinking and filtering how we manage our own emotions and abilities and measure the weight of what we are created to carry and Who is the ultimate carrier.
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