Oh, ask not thou, How shall I bear
The burden of to-morrow?Sufficient for to-day, its care,
Its evil and its sorrow;
God imparteth by the way
Strength sufficient for the day.
J. E. SAXBY.
Everyday we get up and face the world with all of it's twists. . . turns. . . idyllic encounters. Sometimes we coast through our days and sometimes we come home wounded, hiding out in our sanctuary.
I wish I paid more attention to the injustices of the world in my youth. It took my battle with cancer to truly bring me back to life. I haven't really lived until I was diagnosed with cancer. Empathy is earned through experience, not inherited.
There are so many injustices in the world, but we choose to ignore the most difficult to look at. We choose to fight the popular causes of the day rather than worry about the wrongly accused or the accused in general. We justify our lack of empathy by asking why we should be concerned with the salvation of the unsavory ones? We are more concerned with Will Smith slapping Chris Rock on stage. Or what the Kardashians are up to this week. We care more about these folks than all the unsaved, especially the ones we don't care for. We naturally assume the worst even when we have no idea what is going on.
People have issues, real issues that they are experiencing every single day. In one big swoop, someone's world has been turned upside down. Sometimes by their own doing and sometimes by others involvement. The world is not an easy one to live in, let alone be in this life by ourselves. People need other people, because we do not fight alone.
No matter what you are going through out there, we need someone to hold our hand, help us get up in the morning or offer a shoulder to cry on. No one can take away our pain, except Jesus, but they can certainly provide the support to move forward.
This week alone has shown me that there is much pain out there, especially since covid began. People have gone through so much as couples, parents, even individually with no support at all, because they were isolated from others. What we don't see does not affect us. We can easily disengage from all the unpleasantries in case our families become infected by it. That's how we think.
People are either coming out from a crisis, in the middle of a crisis or there's one waiting around the corner. If we would gather together as one, we could benefit from each other's pain. Imagine how much your experience could help someone else.
The problem here, many of us don't want anyone to know the skeletons in our closet. If you grew up like me, when things hit the fan, the first thing we did was shut all the windows. Your problems stayed within the four walls. Even now, I struggle with this affliction. When my family encountered a major crisis, I had no idea where or to whom I could go to. That, my friends, is a shame.
So why did I feel like that? It definitely wasn't because the people around me were not "good" people. I never gave them the chance to show their worth as Christians nor as friends. I was scared, I was raised not to share and I had no idea how to go about it. Granted, there were many who were judgmental and they stayed away. Remember, people are afraid of that same crisis seeping into their home. It's better to stay away.
I am grateful for the ones who broke through the barriers of my upbringing and grabbed my hand. They came, they stayed and they embraced us even when we didn't feel like sharing. Even when we weren't nice.
I learned a valuable lesson. We need people. We cannot go through life alone no matter how much we may push others away, our hearts long for others. Do not allow the devil to tell you that you do not need the fellowship of people in your life. You cannot fight alone and nor should you have to.
Have a blessed day everyone.
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