Praying God's Wisdom: Who is Carrying You?

Images generated by Gemini with direction from the author

Listen to me, you descendants of Jacob,
all the remnant of the people of Israel,
you whom I have upheld since your birth,
and have carried since you were born.
Even to your old age and gray hairs
I am he, I am he who will sustain you.
I have made you and I will carry you;
I will sustain you and I will rescue you.
Isaiah 46:3-4

 This has been a heavy week. There has been so much on my heart and mind. I’ve shared much of it with you, but some things will forever be my quiet struggle. As an added challenge, I’m on my fourth migraine in the last week today. How do I keep track when I have so many memory issues? I’ve started putting Mickey Mouse stickers on my calendar for each migraine day 😂! You see, I’m a very visual person and when things are represented for my eyes it helps me so much to process and remember them. That’s part of what this post today is about, as you’ll see by the images. I spent a fair amount of time with Google Gemini this morning creating cartoons that represented what I was thinking and feeling. I’m very thankful for this tool as I am NOT a graphic artist!

 I wrote on Monday about the burdens we carry, but today, I am faced with the truth that we never really carried them at all. I kept thinking of them like the image above of the man with the heavy load and the person behind him offering to help. I thought of Jesus as just being on the side, waiting for us to lay it all down. Contrary to this picture, our verses tell us that rather than us holding up the weight of the world, in fact, it is Jesus holding us up – all the time, from birth to death. He has carried us since we were born. He made us. He sustains us. He carries us. He rescues us. It’s not on us, it’s on Him.

 So why do I feel so much weight on my shoulders this morning? Why do I feel like I carry a heavy load? Perhaps I have taken advantage of the fact that Jesus is carrying me to pile on a bunch of extra stuff besides? I spent most of my life thinking that if I can, I should. If I can do one more load of dishes, I should. If I can fit one more event into my calendar, I should. A dear friend once told me that I needed to stop “shoulding” all over myself (say it out loud, you’ll get it). Years back, when attending my mother’s church, the pastor gave a message that has stuck with me for years, probably more than a decade now. He extolled the value of leaving margin in our lives. You see, paper manufacturers didn’t just leave those margins on the side of notebook paper to make it so you had less space to use and you’d have to buy more paper! Nope, there’s a very good reason to put it there, several in fact.

 The margins on the side of the paper give us room to edit or leave notes in, this is especially helpful for teachers. It sets boundaries for us so that we can see that the edge is coming and we’ll need to move the next word down or hyphenate it. But more importantly, it draws our attention to the text on the page. Leaving white space around the text actually helps us see it better. In fact, it’s one of the main principles of graphic design. What’s funny is, AI couldn’t not do it. I tried six different ways to get it to generate an image like the one above but with text reaching all the way to the edge of the paper, and it couldn’t do it. No matter how hard it tried, it just had to leave margin. Why is it that AI knows better and we don’t?

 Just because there is space on your calendar, doesn’t mean you have to fill it. Just because you see a chore that needs to be done, doesn't mean you have to do it right now. Leaving space in your life leaves space for God to work. It leaves space for God to show you even better options. It leaves space to trust God to handle all the stuff you can’t. You might think you can, but honey, you really can’t.

Here’s the thing: Just like the guy on the treadmill, we think we’re carrying this load on our own for a long distance, but really, the only distance we’re covering is done by God, not us. He’s the One truly carrying us, whether we know it or not.

 I’ll leave you with this image. It’s my favorite one from this morning, the one I started with, the one I gave the most input into the design on. This is the image that I’ll carry in my heart today, and it will lighten my burden because I’m remembering Who is carrying me.