Some burdens belong to us because God has actually placed them in our hands.
There are people we are responsible to love, duties we should faithfully perform, words we need to govern, wrongs we need to make right, and relationships that deserve effort from us.
Then there are burdens we pick up somewhere along the way, sometimes so early in life that we cannot remember ever choosing them, and we carry them for years as though God Himself assigned them.
The next few days I’m going to be writing a series about those burdens specifically
“The Things We Were Never Meant to Carry”
The longer I live, the more I realize how exhausting it is to spend strength carrying something the Lord never required me to hold in the first place.
Some of these burdens look almost virtuous because they grow beside qualities Christians rightly value.
We care about people, so we begin feeling responsible for how everybody feels.
We want peace in our homes, so we start believing it is our job to prevent anyone from being upset.
We want to honor our parents, love our husband, nurture our children, and preserve relationships, and somewhere inside those good desires we can assume a responsibility that was never ours.
Perhaps one of the heaviest is the belief that we are responsible for everyone’s happiness.
Some women learn this before they are old enough to put language to it.
A child grows up watching the emotional temperature of the house and becomes remarkably skilled at detecting what kind of evening it is going to be before anyone says a word.
She learns which subjects should be avoided when Dad is irritated, how to make Mom feel better when she is upset, and how quickly tension can disappear if she becomes cheerful, helpful, agreeable, or small enough that nobody has another problem to deal with.
Maybe nobody ever sits her down and says, “You are responsible for keeping this family emotionally stable.”
She learns it anyway.
Sometimes a parent does place that burden directly on a child.
A mother may make her daughter feel guilty for growing up, developing friendships, marrying, moving away, or making choices that do not revolve around her.
A father may withdraw affection when his child disappoints him, creating an atmosphere where obedience becomes tangled up with managing his moods.
A child can spend years believing that honoring a parent requires protecting that parent from every uncomfortable feeling.
If that was placed on you, it was too heavy.
Honoring our father and mother is biblical.
Kindness is biblical.
Compassion is biblical.
Scripture gives parents and children real obligations toward one another, yet nowhere does God give a child responsibility for maintaining a parent’s happiness.
Your parent may be disappointed by a godly decision.
They may dislike a boundary.
They may wish you lived closer, called more often, celebrated a holiday differently, raised your children according to their preferences, or made choices that preserved the version of the relationship they wanted.
Their feelings can be real and worthy of compassion while still belonging to them to govern before God.
That can be an extraordinarily difficult distinction for someone who grew up believing that another person’s displeasure automatically meant she had done something wrong.
We carry this pattern into adulthood more easily than we realize.
A wife notices her husband is frustrated and immediately begins searching herself for the reason.
She senses disappointment in his voice and starts rearranging the evening before she knows whether anything needs to be fixed.
If he is discouraged, she feels pressure to lift him out of it. If he is angry about work, she may spend the rest of the night trying to restore the atmosphere of the house because she cannot settle until he does.
Marriage certainly calls us into deep concern for one another.
A wife who sees her husband hurting should care, and a husband should care deeply about the burdens his wife carries.
We are one flesh, and indifference has no place in that covenant.
Still, marriage does not erase personal responsibility before God.
Your husband is responsible for what he does with anger, disappointment, fear, frustration, and sadness, just as you are responsible for what you do with yours.
You can comfort him without believing you must cure him.
You can listen without assuming every burden has become yours to solve.
You can love a man who is having a hard day without frantically trying to turn it into a good one.
I wish more women understood that before wearing themselves completely thin.
Sometimes love means sitting beside someone while they feel something difficult and allowing them to work through it.
We do this with our children too, and perhaps motherhood makes it especially tempting because so much of early mothering really does involve regulating another little human being.
Then children grow.
If we are not careful, we can continue carrying emotional responsibilities they are old enough to begin carrying themselves.
A child becomes disappointed because we said no, and guilt tempts us to change the answer.
A teenager is angry about a reasonable boundary, and suddenly their displeasure feels like evidence that we have damaged the relationship.
An adult child disagrees with a decision we made, and we spend days trying to explain ourselves until they feel better about it.
Good parenting includes teaching children that uncomfortable feelings will not destroy them.
They will sometimes be disappointed.
They will sometimes hear no.
They will experience frustration, embarrassment, grief, anger, and consequences, and part of growing into a stable adult is learning how to bring those emotions under truth rather than expecting everyone around them to rearrange life until they feel comfortable again.
We cannot teach them that lesson while believing their happiness is the measurement of whether we have loved them well.
Our culture has made this more complicated because feelings are often treated as though their existence settles the question of who is right.
If someone feels hurt, we can assume somebody else must have behaved wrongly.
If a boundary makes another person uncomfortable, the boundary itself is questioned.
If a disagreement produces distress, we begin searching for language soft enough to remove every trace of discomfort.
Feelings matter because people matter, and Christians should never use truth as an excuse to become callous toward another person’s pain.
Yet feelings need governing.
They can be sincere and still shaped by fear, pride, exhaustion, misunderstanding, past wounds, jealousy, insecurity, or expectations that another person could never reasonably fulfill.
The Bible takes the inner life seriously enough to tell us repeatedly that we are responsible for what we do with it.
“He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.” Proverbs 25:28
There is an enormous freedom in finally understanding that God has given me stewardship over my own heart while giving other adults stewardship over theirs.
I can examine whether I have been loving.
I can ask whether my words were gracious.
I can apologize when I have sinned.
I can reconsider a decision when wise counsel shows me I was wrong, and I can take another person’s pain seriously without automatically assuming I am required to make the pain disappear.
After I have done what obedience requires, there comes a place where another person has to carry their own response before God.
Galatians contains both sides of this truth in the same chapter.
We are told, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ,” and only a few verses later, “For every man shall bear his own burden.”
I think we need both because life requires wisdom to know the difference.
There are burdens so heavy that love should move us underneath them with somebody else. Grief, illness, calamity, severe trials, seasons when a person simply cannot carry everything alone all call Christians toward one another.
Then there are responsibilities that remain personal, including the stewardship of our own heart and conduct.
When we confuse those categories, love can become control without our realizing what happened.
Trying to keep everyone happy sounds caring, but eventually it requires managing people.
We begin anticipating reactions, withholding things that may upset them, overexplaining decisions, changing boundaries according to mood, and monitoring every conversation for signs that somebody is displeased.
After a while, we can hardly tell what we actually believe because so many choices are being made according to how someone else might respond.
That kind of life is exhausting.
It can also produce resentment because no human being is capable of maintaining another person’s emotional peace indefinitely.
You can make every effort to keep somebody happy and discover they are still unhappy.
You can give more than wisdom requires and discover that the expectation simply grows.
You can spend years carefully arranging yourself around someone else’s emotions and eventually realize that the standard for keeping peace has moved so often that you no longer know where it is.
There comes a point where love has to allow another person to feel what they feel without making their feelings the master of our decisions.
This may be especially hard for Christian women because we have been taught, rightly, to be tenderhearted, compassionate, peaceable, giving, and attentive to others.
Those virtues are beautiful when they grow under the authority of Scripture.
But, even a good virtue can become distorted when fear takes hold of it.
I have had to learn that somebody being unhappy with me does not automatically mean I have sinned against them.
That sounds elementary until someone you deeply love is disappointed in you.
Then every old instinct can wake up.
You want to explain one more time.
You want to find the sentence that will finally make them understand.
You replay the conversation and wonder whether a slightly different tone could have prevented all of this.
Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is examine ourselves honestly, make right whatever truly belongs to us, and then allow another adult the dignity of working through their own emotions with the Lord.
We cannot repent for feelings we did not create.
We cannot process another person’s disappointment for them.
We cannot guarantee that obedience will leave everyone around us pleased.
Even Jesus lived among people who were disappointed, offended, angry, confused, and grieved by things He said and did.
He loved people perfectly while allowing them to have responses He did not rush to manage.
There is something in that which I think many women need permission to consider.
We can love without carrying everybody.
We can care deeply without making ourselves responsible for every emotional outcome.
We can be compassionate toward somebody’s pain while trusting that God is able to work in their heart without our constant intervention.
And perhaps the hardest part is accepting that some people will interpret this change in us as a change in love.
If they have always known us as the one who fixes the mood, absorbs the guilt, changes the plan, makes the phone call, apologizes first whether we were wrong or not, and works until everybody feels better, then stepping out of that role may feel uncomfortable to everyone.
It may feel uncomfortable to us most of all.
We have to learn how to tolerate someone else’s disappointment without immediately trying to erase it.
That takes practice.
It also takes faith because ultimately this burden belongs to God in a way it never belonged to us.
He can reach our parents where we cannot.
He can work in our husband’s heart without our managing every step.
He can teach our children through disappointment, consequences, waiting, and even our refusal to rescue them from every hard feeling.
Some burdens are responsibilities.
Others belong to God.
The wisdom comes in learning which is which.
If you have spent years carrying everyone’s happiness, perhaps the first question is not how quickly you can put the whole burden down.
Sometimes old patterns loosen gradually because they are tied into fear, family history, and ways of relating that have existed for decades.
We were made to love one another deeply, to bear burdens, to comfort, encourage, serve, forgive, and care.
We were never given the job of making everyone happy.
That burden is too large for human shoulders, and perhaps some of us have spent long enough carrying it to finally admit how tired we are.
There may be great relief waiting in learning to say, with love and without guilt, that another person is allowed to have their feelings, while we remain responsible before God for what He has actually placed in our hands.
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