Bear One Another Burdens, and Stay

She is the person you ring when something has gone wrong, and she is very good at it, and everybody in that church knows it.

Boiler failed on a Sunday. Somebody's benefits stopped. A woman needed to be at two hospitals on the same afternoon. She has a folder on her phone with numbers in it and she can get almost anything sorted within about four hours, and she does not make a fuss and she does not talk about it afterward.

On Tuesday somebody asked her to sit with Marjorie for an afternoon.

Marjorie is eighty one and her husband died in June and there is nothing wrong that can be fixed. The house is fine. The money is fine. The family are attentive. There is no problem in that house at all, there is only the fact of it, and somebody thought Marjorie should not be by herself on the anniversary of something.

She said yes immediately because she always says yes and then spent Wednesday in a low panic.

Because she genuinely does not know what she is supposed to do. Not in an anxious way. In a practical way. She will be in a chair in a front room for four hours with a woman she likes, with nothing to arrange, nothing to ring anybody about, and nothing in the folder on her phone that is any use whatsoever.

She said to her husband, and she was half laughing: I do not know what to do with my hands.

Sit down. There is an instruction that answers that exactly, and the verb in it is not what you expect.

Bear is the verb

Here it is, and the whole answer is in the word.

Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.Galatians 6:2

Bear. Not lift. Not remove. Not resolve. Bear, which is what you do with a weight that is not going anywhere, and which requires you to be under it rather than beside it.

That is a completely different action from the one this woman is good at, and it is the one being asked for on Thursday.

And look at what it is called: fulfilling the law of Christ. That is not a modest description. Sitting under a weight with somebody is named as the fulfillment of the whole thing, which puts it several rungs above sorting a boiler.

You are being given a real job rather than a blank afternoon. Galatians 6:2 uses the word bear rather than the word fix, and the Spirit inspired that verb into the sentence and called the doing of it the law of Christ.

Why fixing feels like the only competence

Now the panic, because it is worth understanding rather than pushing through.

Solving has an end. There is a moment where the boiler works, and the moment is visible to everybody in the room, and that is a large part of why that work is bearable.

Bearing has no such moment. You will sit for four hours and at the end of it Marjorie's husband will still be dead and nothing will have visibly changed, and there will be no point at which you know it worked.

That is not you being bad at this. That is what the thing is. It is the reason so few people do it and the reason the ones who do are remembered for years.

And there is a second thing you will have to survive, which is that the afternoon may be dull. Long stretches of a grieving house are extremely boring, and almost nobody says that, and the boredom is one of the reasons people leave at ninety minutes and tell themselves the widow was tired. Galatians 6:2 does not offer an exemption for tedium, and the Spirit is at work in the fourth hour as much as in the first.

You are not useless in that room. Nothing written anywhere ranks arranging above accompanying, and the Spirit named bearing a burden as the fulfillment of the law rather than as what you do when there is nothing practical available.

What to do with your hands

Here is the practical part, in the form a practical person will actually use.

Take something small and useless. A cake, some flowers, a photograph of her husband if you have one. It gives the first ten minutes a shape, and nothing written anywhere forbids a prop, and the Spirit is not offended by a cake.

Ask her about him. Not about how she is. About him. What he was like at twenty. What he was hopeless at. What he said when he was annoyed.

Then let her talk, and do not solve anything she mentions. This is the hard part for you. She will mention the garden being too much, and every instinct in you will reach for the folder on your phone, and if you do that the afternoon turns into an appointment. Note it. Do it next week. Not on Thursday.

And stay the whole four hours. Do not leave early because it goes quiet. The quiet is the thing you were sent for. Galatians 6:2 asks for a burden to be borne rather than for an hour to be filled, and the Spirit does not need conversation to be at work in a room.

There is one more piece of the folder that is actually useful here, and it is the only part that transfers. You are good at noticing what needs doing. Use that, and write nothing down in front of her, and take the list home. The garden. The thing about the car insurance. Whatever she mentions and lets go of. Then do those next week without announcing them, which is a completely different act from solving them in her front room while she is trying to talk about her husband.

You have something to carry into that house. What is written asks for a burden to be borne rather than removed, and the Spirit is at work in an afternoon where nothing measurable happens.