Matthew 11:28-30


Come to me all who are weary and heavy-laden. 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.

After spending so much time thinking about not being busy, or about depression, or reading McDonalds book: Ordering your Private World, it seems like this is a time management verse. It feels like it to me. And if I don't work hard to not make it so, that's what it ends up becoming to me.

But it has so much more depth than that. Jack Bernard used to talk about Kairos Time. A view of time that takes the Time-Management categories and skews all the questions. I never understood it. I asked him about a thousand times to explain it, and he did, mystic style, which means he asked questions that didn't have anything to do with my answers. Frankly, they weren't my questions, so I didn't really understand them. But he was right. I know this by experience that he was right. It doesn't do me much good however, because I still don't understand the questions, much less the answers. I'm still stuck on how much time I've really got and how much of it goes to InnerCHANGE, Sojourners, or Family. Jack never could just answer the question, because he kept saying I was asking the wrong ones.

I'm sure that that's what happens with this section when I think of it as a time management thing. I end up saying, "I've got a heavy burden, it's called "I have 9 meetings today", how are you going to make that light." Then I pray, quickly, and then I find out I still have 9 meetings, so I rush out to meet and, guess what, Jesus let me down because 9 meetings isn't easy or light.

I think that sabbatical has made this a more manageable verse. I sort of missed the whole, COME, TAKE, LEARN, FIND sections. I guess I only read that His yoke was easy and light, and wondered how he had time for a light burden.

So I took this week to memorize this verse. I had mostly memorized it before, but I wanted to think it through so this has been my Mascot Verse for the week. And I'm noticing that Jesus has to be taken at his word.

For one thing, he's saying this after his Way-Maker, his Trail-Blazer John the Baptist, has sent friends to ask, get this, "are you the one we've been waiting for, or should we keep looking". This is a cheeky bastard thing to say. (Course it's the sort of thing I think all the time, but at least you won't catch me saying it out loud.) So his best friend John is egging him on. "What are you doing? Where's the revolution!?" And then Jesus replies by saying that the revolution is here, because the Lame are walking, the blind are seeing, the captives are being set free." You know, the thing. And John the baptist is probably going to point out that not ALL of the captives have been set free. So then Jesus goes into a bunch of things that made sense to the people he's writing to, but not much sense to me until he gets into the "time management section"... Come unto me and all that.

So you can see why I'm uncomfortable with my natural inclinations that this is a time management verse.

Posted: Fri - January 23, 2004 at 07:18 AM        

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