Kirkepiscatoid

This week's text was Matthew 11:16-30, and Wallace's sermon focused particularly on vv. 28-30: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Now, I don’t know much about yokes, but I do know something about harnesses and horse collars! He mentioned in his sermon, “This yoke is easy, because it fits our nature.” The very first thing I thought about was the importance of having a collar that fits in a horse harness. If you don’t choose a collar that fits, the entire hitch is unbalanced; the horse is not distributing the weight of the load correctly, and it will chafe and rub the horse’s shoulders. When we broke my mule to drive, it was a bear to find the right collar for him. Mule shoulders are built differently, they’re narrower, and most standard sized horse collars don’t fit. If you don’t start with the right collar, he will resist in his learning, simply because it HURTS! It does not fit him. He does not have the balance he needs in the rigging to properly pull the load of the wagon. He cannot do the work he was meant to do because it hurts him.

How much of our lives do we try to live wearing a horse collar that wasn’t “ours”? In contrast, think of those moments that are filled with wonderment and delight where we are feeling the full force of God’s love. Nothing is rubbing or chafing—because we are wearing “our” horse collars. They fit perfectly. We work in harness and pull our load willingly because it fits us.

I thought about my week this past week. I had a lot on my plate, all of it seeming to be needed to be taken care of yesterday. I spent all week trying to pull loads with someone else’s horse collar on. I was worried about what I was NOT. That’s easy to do when you are wearing a horse collar that doesn’t fit. You can see the gaps or the places where it’s too tight. Instead of simply saying, “That’s not my collar,” I said, “I don’t fit.” I let the poorly fitting horse collar define me. So by Friday, I’m going, “This is stupid. I need to put my own horse collar back on, but my shoulders are still pretty sore.”

I could tell, though, that the week wore me down. I was not ready to pull my full burden. So I spent my 4th of July “decompressing.” That was very unusual for me. 4th of July is my favorite holiday; I love the picnics and the fireworks and just the complete lack of expectation for the holiday. But I simply did not feel up to being "large group social." So I stayed home, lay around the house, farted around on the internet, and read and reflected. Very very unusual. A lot of people would have said I let my holiday go to waste. But it was nothing close to waste.

When I get worn down, I have a real need to crawl into my den and lick my wounds. I can stay there for a while to the degree that it makes those close to me a little nervous. I am generally a very animated, active and quick-witted person...but I become very "subdued" when in my den. It can make people think I am depressed. But I don't tend to stay there long and usually crawl out in a day or two. However, when I crawl out, I don't leap out, I kind of come out in increments. I call it "decompression" because it is like a deep sea diver coming to the surface. Come out too fast and I get the "bends". So I surface a little, stay and have to dive back down a little--just not so far--then go up a little again--repeat the process till I'm at the surface.

But back to this "horse collar" business. I was ready to put my own horse collar back on by the afternoon of July 4; but I wasn't ready to jump in harness and just go to pulling. The problem is, when we put our own horse collars back on, at first it doesn’t feel right. It’s kind of like when you’ve been driving someone else’s car and when you get back in yours, even though no one’s moved the seat in your car, it feels funny. It’s like you forgot what your own car seat felt like a little.

So on Friday afternoon I gave Wallace a call and found out he had no big plans for the afternoon and felt like taking a long walk, asked me if I wanted to go walk with him. That sounded like a good idea--although I was not ready for "group social," I figured a "walk and chat" with the vicar was do-able. Our walks are generally good. We have a tendency to bounce all kinds of things off each other in an easy friendly way. It comes off more like a conversation between friends than it does priest-parishioner, although I'm no fool; he's secretly sneaking in the priest-parishioner interaction. The trade-off for him, I think, is that I am talking to him like he's an "ordinary mortal", and he probably doesn't get enough of that in life sometimes. So our walks usually come out to be mutually beneficial experiences.

I could have gotten used to my own horse collar again on my own, but I recognized I would re-adjust faster if there was someone else there to remind me that, yes, this is “my” horse collar and it fits, and maybe let that person pick the burrs out from under it and adjust the harness a little. So I, to borrow a phrase from his Sunday sermon again, “surrendered to a friend’s gentle concern and firm support.”

I felt a lot more "decompressed" after the walk. He already knew a lot of the details about my week. My end of the conversation was more about just feeling the need to come out from under the details a little. His end of the conversation was more about validating that my suspicions were correct, I was uncomfortable all week because I was trying to labor under the expectations of others vs. what I was capable of doing, which, at times is a form of self-betrayal. This self-betrayal can get in our way of feeling our connection to the Almighty. He was basically saying in a different way, “This is your horse collar, and it fits you perfectly...and my God, look at the amazing loads you can pull with it! Why pull like a dilapidated old plow horse in some other horse collar when you are a grand champion puller in your own?”

God picked out very special “off the rack” horse collars for all of us, I think. Some of us might well be running around in very strange horse collars, but they fit us, none the less, and we should feel free to labor in them and be assured they fit, and be satisfied with that. But we betray ourselves at times by thinking we ought to be wearing a horse collar that looks like everyone else’s...and guess what...they don’t fit, and they don’t fit every time we’ve been dumb enough to try them on again, and we have rub spots from all the times we have tried them on before, and they chafe us faster every time. So we run around in ill-fitting collars, thinking it's "us" that is the problem, rather than the fact we're not wearing "our horse collar." Go figure. But if we take on "Jesus' yoke" we need to be reminded that it is a yoke that fits us. He would never put us in a collar that doesn't fit and we need to trust that!