It occurred to me (after writing yesterday’s blog) that sometimes it is hard to ‘give’ to others when we are actually carrying a lot of stuff ourselves. That is to say that, when we are carrying heavy burdens that weigh us down and preoccupy us, it is sometimes hard to notice those opportunities to ‘give’ to others.
It seems to me that in order to be able to be a ‘big giver’ in life, we need first of all to give ourselves fully to the Lord, which includes being able to give our burdens to Him. I think Peter knew this because he wrote to his friends, who were probably having a tough time, ‘Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that He may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you. 1 Peter 5:7.
David, a man who went through many storms and trials, likewise encourages us to ‘Cast your cares on the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never let the righteous fall.’ Psalm 55:22. If we are to be free in ourselves, in order to be able to notice and give to others, if we are to be ‘care free’ and not ‘care full’, we are going to need to develop that skill of casting or deliberately and actively giving those same cares to the Lord.
I think many of us have our ‘cares’ on a bungee rope tied around our waist. We do come to the Lord and give them to Him but, somehow, we don’t let them go, and they bounce back into our minds/lives as soon as we leave our place of prayer and get back to the business of life.
This could be because we are still trying to work things out for ourselves, or because we don’t fully trust the Lord to sort things out as we would like Him too. In a way it doesn’t matter why we don’t fully give our cares to the Lord, but it does matter that we do learn to do so.
The Amplified Bible expands the last part of 1 Peter 5:7 like this. ‘Casting the whole of your care (all your anxieties, all your worries, all your concerns, once and for all) on Him, for He cares for you affectionately and cares about you watchfully.’ It’s that ‘once and for all’ phrase that challenges me. So how do we do that? How do we fully let things go to Him and refuse to keep pulling them back onto our own shoulders again.
Yes. You guessed it. We stand on His word and we stay in thankfulness that He has heard us. We thank Him that He cares for us. We thank Him that His mighty hand will lift us up in due time; that he will sustain us and not let us fall. Thanksgiving for these truths, I believe, ‘cuts’ the bungee rope between us and our worries, and that so pleases the Lord.
If the rope is tough we need to be persistent in our thanksgiving and find those promises that help us to ‘cut it’. We can also give thanks for the way He has taken care of us in the past. A note book recording our own previous testimony can be very helpful here, helping us to remember what an amazing and wonderful thing it is that the Lord wants our cares; that He wants us to be ‘care free’, and that we can start our journey towards being ‘big givers’ in life, by first giving to the Lord everything that would weigh us down and take away our capacity for giving.
