Come unto me

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." — Matthew 11:28

I read the words of Jesus in Matthew this morning and I stopped at the word labour.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

It is the end of July. The garden is giving more than I can keep up with and the canning has started and my hands smell like tomatoes and vinegar at the end of every day. The back porch thermometer said ninety-one yesterday at two in the afternoon. I watered the garden at six in the morning and by noon the ground was dry again. This is the labor of July. It is not a complaint. It is a fact.

Earl knew what a yoke was. Not from the Bible. From the barn. A yoke is a piece of wood shaped to fit across the shoulders of an animal so the animal can pull something heavy without the weight sitting in the wrong place. The yoke does not remove the weight. It distributes it. It makes the carrying possible.

I think about this when I read the passage. Jesus does not say come unto me and I will take the burden away. He says take my yoke upon you. He is offering a better way to carry what you are already carrying. The labor does not stop. The garden does not stop giving. The canning does not do itself. July does not cool down because you have asked it to. But the weight can sit differently on your shoulders if you let it.

I have been a laboring woman all my life. I do not mean this dramatically. I mean I have worked. I raised three children and I taught other people's children for nearly fifty years and I kept a house and a garden and a marriage and I have been tired in my body more days than I have not been tired. The tiredness is not the problem. The tiredness is the evidence of a life being lived.

What wears a person down is not the labor. It is the carrying of it alone. It is the belief that you must manage the weight by yourself, that asking for help is weakness, that the yoke is yours and only yours. I believed this for a long time. I am still learning not to believe it.

The coffee is cold. The garden is waiting. I will go out in a few minutes and do what July asks me to do. But I sat with this passage first, because the invitation is worth sitting with. Come. Rest. Not rest as stopping. Rest as carrying differently.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.