The Burden Is Light Sample

The Life You Long For

Do you ever feel you are hovering around your life but constantly distracted and lured away? Have you been pulled into cyber reality while feeling guilty about not being present where you are? We get knots in our stomachs at the thought of that, yet we feel powerless to break these sabotaging patterns in our lives. 

The solution is not to try harder or beg God to break into our lives. We do not need a miracle to save us from the mundane. Our cure will be found in becoming aware of the miracle called life happening all around us. We must teach ourselves how to discern the ways in which God is already present and working in our lives.

This isn’t as simple as it sounds. We may find this difficult due to our own cynicism, the distractions we encounter, or the hurt we have endured—or we could simply find it hard to believe that we are candidates for spiritual enlightenment. 

The life we long for is not something we discover or invent or declare to be true. The life we long for is something we receive. In the midst of the pain and heartache, regret and trauma, frustration and anger, a Savior had intervened in the human story. This Savior wanted his life to be the source of our life, and that, ultimately, is what we long for: to have the attention of our Creator and to be known, to be rescued from our sin and adopted into his family, to be delivered from the burden of misliving and taught to walk in the path of his light. The light that shines in the darkness is the light of
 

• compassion in a culture of competition
• blessing in the face of the curse
• calling in a culture of comparison
• surrender in the face of control
• mercy in a culture of judgment
• humility in a culture of pride
• passion in a world of complacency
• presence in a culture of distraction 

This life is found in connection to Christ. It is his power and love and grace flowing through us, healing the brokenness of our stories, that give us the meaning and satisfaction we so desperately seek. 

What does it look like to receive the life you long for rather than try to grab it?