Dear one,
Yesterday, neither for the first, nor undoubtedly for the last time, I read these words of John Baillie:
“Give me a stout heart to bear my own burdens. Give me a willing heart to bear the burdens of others.”[1]
In my reading, I found these simple words, the imperatives of prayer, causing me to ponder afresh. Now, in all fairness to you, these two sentences might strike you as bland, “pious,” and/or somehow less than provocative, a response I fully understand. But in the context of my life, these words, written nearly a century ago by a well know Scots theologian and presbyter, reflect a language and cadence no longer exactly ours—no longer contemporary—and yet in them I hear a “true heart” not too far removed from my own.
As a further, and perhaps better example, Baillie wrote:
“My hardness of heart towards my neighbours’ faults
and my readiness to make allowance for my own:
My unwillingness to believe that Thou has called me
to a small work and my brother to a great one:
O Lord, forgive.”[2]
Even now as I share this heart-felt prayer with you, I find a further stirring within me: “Oh, how quickly I critique others, but then equally quickly excuse my own faults. Oh, how quickly I can decry the smallness of my lot, all the while devaluing the greatness granted others.”
At any rate, Baillie’s prayer regarding burdens often moves me to ask: Just what are those burdens that I am to bear stoutly—and why are they mine? Are they “natural” to me because of biology or because of behavior? Are they mine because of certain strengths or weaknesses—or commitments? Moreover, might these personal burdens harden me, so that I become unwilling to bear the burdens of others? If so, then I have little understood Paul’s imperative: “Bear one another’s’ burdens and thus you will fulfill the law of Christ”—and what is that law or command if not Jesus' words: “[Just] as I have loved you, you also love one another”?[3]
As you and I know almost daily, whether within the microcosm of family, friends, and neighbors, or within the macrocosm of nation-states and vast, geo-ethnic regions, something has gone horribly awry, and we feel overwhelmed: greatly burdened. “This shouldn’t be,” we moan, and to this conclusion, Baillie added a further imperative:
“Give me a believing heart to cast all burdens upon Thee.”
Amen,
Stan
[1] John Baillie, A Dairy of Private Prayer, (New York: Scribner, 1949), p.113.[2] Ibid., p.15[3] Cf. Galatians 6:2; John 13:34.