Craig Clouston

The Sunday Paper

January 4

Cast all your anxiety on him, for he cares for you.

1 Peter 5:7

One minute Stevie was laboring through snowdrifts, the next he was flat on his back.

A rural paperboy, Stevie was held captive under the weight of two hundred Sunday edition papers jammed into the bags crisscrossing his shoulders. It was 3:15 a.m., and there was no one he could call on for help.

Slight of build, it was all he could do to hoist the bags in place before leaving the house on his early morning trek. His route usually took him an hour and a half to deliver. The deep snow would increase that by fifty percent. But right now it stood to be several hours! He realized he had to extricate himself if he didn’t want to spend several hours waiting for someone to miss him and come looking.

Spurred on by the thought of freezing to death at the tender age of eleven, he managed to dig himself out from under the bags. Free of his predicament, he left one bag lying there, returning for it in a circuitous route after emptying the first bag.

Stevie learned two valuable lessons that morning: never carry more than you can handle, and fear is a great motivator!

†

God never intends us to carry the burdens of life alone. We make that choice ourselves. Today’s headline speaks of sharing the load. Too often we try to extricate ourselves from the burdens of life. We struggle under intense, self-inflicted weight, not understanding that God is right beside us, waiting for us to ask for help. As with Stevie, we sometimes try to carry more than we are meant to. Succeeding on our own in the beginning, we come to believe that it is God’s plan for us to do it ourselves. If we do that enough times successfully, we end up like Stevie—with the weight of the world on our shoulders.

As we learn to become God sufficient instead of self-sufficient, we find that our burdens decrease as our dependency on God increases.

Prayer

“Teach me to share, Lord. Sometimes I’m not so good at it. I’ve been told to be self-sufficient in order to be strong. Show me the benefits of giving You the heavy weight of daily living. In Jesus’ Name, amen.”