Bear Ye One Another's Burdens Requires Somebody to Hand One Over

A man told me the hardest thing about his condition is not the condition. It is the sentence.

The sentence is: could you give me a hand with something.

He said he can face almost anything except saying that, and that he has calculated, roughly, that he does not do about four things a week purely because doing them would require him to say it. Not big things. A shelf. A lid. A drive.

And he said the part he finds humiliating is that everybody would say yes immediately and be glad, and he knows it, and it does not help at all.

I know that arithmetic. I have done a version of it standing at the bottom of a set of stairs, working out whether the thing at the top was worth the sentence.

There is a verse everybody in a church knows, and it has two people in it, and we have only ever taught one of them.

The verse has two roles and we teach one

Here it is.

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2, King James Version)

Every sermon on that verse is aimed at the carrier. Be the kind of person who helps. Notice who is struggling. Turn up.

All of that is right and none of it is the whole verse, because the instruction cannot be obeyed unless somebody hands a burden over.

One another's is mutual by construction. It describes traffic in both directions, and a room where everybody is trying to be the carrier is a room where the verse cannot be kept by anybody.

Which means the asking is not the failure state of that verse. It is half of the mechanism, and the man who will not ask is quietly preventing other people from obeying an instruction.

You are half of that verse rather than an exception to it. Galatians 6:2 says bear ye one another's burdens, which requires traffic in both directions, and it is the same Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12:13 by whom we are all baptized into one body, who assembled a body in which nobody carries their own weight alone.

The man on the roof did not ask either

There is a scene in Mark that people tell as a story about determined friends, and the person nobody talks about is the man on the mat.

And when they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was: and when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay. (Mark 2:4)

Put a person on that mat for a second. He is carried through a town by four friends. He is lifted onto a roof. He lies there listening to them dig a hole in somebody's ceiling. And then he is lowered, on his bed, into a crowded room, in front of a famous teacher and everybody who came to hear him.

There is no dignified way to arrive like that. Every eye in the room is on a man who did not walk in.

And the text says something about it that is easy to miss: when Jesus saw their faith. Their faith. Plural. The faith credited in that scene is the faith of a group, and the man on the mat is inside the group rather than beside it.

You are inside the faith of the people carrying you rather than outside it. Mark 2:5 says when Jesus saw their faith, counting the whole group. It is the Spirit of God, Ephesians 4:3 keeping the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, who binds a group into something that can be counted together.

Moses had his arms held up

If a person thinks needing help is a lesser condition, there is a scene in Exodus where the most important man in the nation cannot hold his own arms up.

But Moses' hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side. (Exodus 17:12)

Moses' hands were heavy. And a battle is being decided by whether they stay up.

Nobody in that passage suggests Moses should have tried harder. Two men hold his arms. He sits on a rock. The outcome is credited to the whole arrangement and the chapter is not embarrassed about any of it.

That is a picture of a leader in the middle of the most important thing he ever did, physically unable, and being propped up by two people, and it is recorded without one word of apology.

You are allowed to be held up in the middle of the most important thing you do. Exodus 17:12 has two men staying up Moses' hands without one word of criticism. It is His Spirit, Zechariah 4:6 saying not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, who is named as what a work actually runs on.

What the asker is actually giving

There is a sentence of Jesus quoted only once in the New Testament, and it is usually used to encourage giving. Read it from the other side.

It is more blessed to give than to receive. (Acts 20:35)

Everybody takes that as an instruction to be a giver. Fine. But follow the arithmetic: if giving carries the greater blessing, then a person who refuses to receive is holding on to the smaller half and denying somebody else the larger one.

That is not humility. That is, at best, a very polite form of taking.

I say this as somebody who did it for years and thought I was being considerate. What I was actually doing was making sure that every transaction in my life ran in the direction that cost me the least dignity.

You are handing somebody the better half when you let them help. Acts 20:35 says it is more blessed to give than to receive, and it is the Holy Spirit, Galatians 5:22 naming love and kindness among His fruit, who supplies both the giving and the willingness to be on the other end of it.

And if the not asking has narrowed your week down to what you can manage alone, say that out loud to a person: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. A life quietly shrinking to fit around one sentence is worth naming to somebody.