Burden Bearer

Every year, YouVersion announces which Bible verses are the most shared, bookmarked, and highlighted by its users. The list often includes the classics like Jeremiah 29:11 or John 3:16, but this year, the app announced that Philippians 4:6 took the top spot.

The Scripture reads: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”

Yeah, that checks out for 2024.

YouVersion founder and CEO Bobby Gruenewald believes this verse’s popularity shows that people are regularly turning to God when they face stress and daily struggles.

Gruenewald said, ‘In many cases, our anxiety comes from holding onto worries that we aren’t meant to carry. To me, this verse being sought out the most this year is an illustration that our community is seeking God in prayer and choosing to trust Him to carry their burdens—and we’re seeing that supported in the data.’

12-year-old Brody Ridder arrived home from school with a nearly empty yearbook, only managing to acquire the signatures of two teachers and two classmates despite asking for more. Ridder decided to sign his own yearbook with a note to himself: "Hope you make some more friends.”

Ridder's mom, Cassandra Ridder, had reached her breaking point. Her son's message to himself was a reflection of months’ worth of bullying her son experienced at school in a Denver suburb. Brody's hurt and pain inspired her to share a message with the parent's Facebook group for the school:

My poor son. Doesn't seem like it's getting any better. 2 teachers and a total of 2 students wrote in his yearbook. Despite Brody asking all kinds of kids to sign it. So, Brody took it upon himself to write to himself. My heart is shattered. Teach your kids kindness.

After sharing the post with the school community, Cassandra posted to her personal Facebook, wanting to keep her friends updated on what was happening. That is when the support exploded; celebrities, companies, parents, kids all reached out online and in real life to show Brody support.

Among those to see Cassandra's message was Paul Rudd, who plays Ant-Man in the hit films Ant-Man and Avengers: Endgame. Rudd FaceTimed Ridder and sent him a handwritten note: “It's important to remember that even when life gets tough that things get better. There are so many people that love you and think you are the coolest kid there is — me being one of them!" Brody also received a signed Ant-Man helmet from the actor.

For NFL player James Smith-Williams, it started with a challenge. The Washington Commanders defensive end was a student at North Carolina State University when he heard a speaker named Brenda Tracy talk about her experience surviving sexual assault. James told reporters, “Her biggest takeaway was, ‘If you’re a good man, what are you doing to be a good man?’ That really stuck with me.”

Once he entered the NFL, Smith-Williams partnered with Tracy’s nonprofit to establish a network of players who raise money and awareness for nonprofits that support survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault. Because October has been deemed as Domestic Violence Awareness Month, he has been supporting the Purple Leash Project. This initiative seeks to make domestic violence shelters more friendly for pets, because of their potential for emotional support.

According to Smith-Williams, only 15% of current shelters even allow pets. “About half of the people who are in domestic violence situations delay leaving because of their pet. Pets are family too. Ensuring that people who have pets and who are in these situations have a place to go, I just think that is so important.”

Smith-Williams recently helped build doghouses at a local shelter who received a Purple Leash Project grant. He also wore a pair of purple cleats during a game in support of the charity. “As long as I have the ability to help out, I definitely will.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Having an effective witness is more than just avoiding sinful or abusive behavior. It’s also taking action in helping to defend and assist people suffering abuse in order to demonstrate the love of God to people who hurting.

The sun rises over the bay in Vinoy Park in St. Petersburg, Florida. Lounging on a bench near the sea wall—his bench—is Al Nixon. “Hi Al!” say the passers-by. “Have a good day!” says Al. For park regulars between 6am and 8am, he’s as reliable as the squirrels or the water fountains. Many who pass stop to chat. Many just give and receive a little wave. Day after day. Al has watched the sunrise from his bench, seven days a week, for years. Everyone seems to know him.

About seven years ago, Al needed to clear his head. Trouble at work, mostly. He found the perfect bench near the sea wall and watched the sun come up. It worked, and he started showing up for sunrise three or four days a week.

One day a complete stranger came up and told Al something he’ll never forget. “I know, when I see you sitting there, that everything is going to be alright.” Al said, “For the first time, I knew there was more of a purpose to me being out here than just soothing my own woes. We have an impact on other people.” Not only did he keep coming, but it became every day, even weekends. He had to do his duty.

Something else happened when he showed up every day. People started confiding in him. They told him about their children, their own childhoods, their finances, and their marriages. At the height of the pandemic, people told Al about loved ones they lost. Al said, “Mostly people just want to be heard. I’ve heard a thousand stories. I don’t consider myself all that smart, or debonair, but I’m a good listener.”

Then at 8am sharp, an alarm sounded on his phone. Al stood up, and walked off. He headed to work, feeling like his job was already done.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Encouragement; Friendship; Listening – One of the greatest gifts we can give to others is to listen, to care, and encourage them. 2) Christ, burden bearer; Love of Christ – The greatest Friend we have loves us (Eph 3:18-19), prays for us (Heb. 7:25), and will never forsake us (Heb. 13:5).

Kevin Martin was a minister at a massive church—but one of those churches where it got too burdensome. The administrative machine ate him up, and his world was blackened with depression. At one point he was so depressed, so crushed, that he hastily wrote a letter to his board, immediately resigning from office, and then wrote a letter to his wife and his children saying he would never see them again.

Kevin got in his Buick and drove up to Newfoundland, Canada, without anybody knowing where he was. He got a job as a logger. It was winter. He lived in a small metal trailer, heated at night by a small metal heater. One night, when it was 20 below, the heater stopped working. In a rage, Kevin went over to the heater, picked it up with both his hands, and chucked it out the window—then realizing that was a stupid thing to do, for it was 20 below.

He throws himself on the ground and starts pounding the floor of this small metal trailer. As he’s pounding on the floor, he is yelling out to heaven, “I hate you! I hate you! Get out of my life! I am done with this Christian game. It is over!” He went into a fetal position.

Kevin writes, I couldn’t even cry. I was too exhausted to cry. As I laid there, I heard crying, and heaving breaths, but they were not coming from me. Instead, in the bright darkness of faith, I heard Christ crying, and heaving away on the Cross. And then I knew, the blood was for me: for the Kevin who was the abandoner, the reckless wanderer, the blasphemer of heaven. And then the words rose up all around me: ‘Kevin, I am with you, and I am for you, and you will get through this. I promise you.’

Kevin rose to his feet, got into his car, sped back home, and reconciled with his family and his church. And then went on to lead that church in a healthy way.

In this life, there are friends … and then then are friends.

In May 2009, Dillon Hill's best-friend-since-fourth-grade Chris Betancourt got a diagnosis of chronic myeloid leukemia. Since the two became friends through their mutual love of video games, Hill made frequent visits to Betancourt, playing games to lift his spirit. After lengthy chemotherapy treatments and hospital visits, Betancourt was cancer-free, and remained so throughout his teenage years.

So when Betancourt got the news that his leukemia had returned and wouldn't be curable without a bone marrow transfusion, Hill subsequently dropped out of college and started a campaign to honor his friend. He asked Betancourt to make a list of all of the exploits and hijinks he wanted to do before he died, then began posting videos of their adventures to raise money and awareness.

One of the items on the bucket list was to get matching tattoos. Their recent ink was an homage to the FX series It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a quote by character Frank Reynolds, played by Danny DeVito:

"I don't know how many years on this earth I have left, but I'm gonna get real weird with it."

Pictures of the tattoo circulated on Reddit and social media, and got the attention of Rob McElhenny, one of the show's co-stars. McElhenny was so moved by Hill and Betancourt's friendship that not only are they scheduled to meet DeVito in person.

Potential Preaching Angles: True friendship goes the distance, persistence will eventually be rewarded, we find joy from bearing one another's burdens

Andy Crouch shares this touching story: A few years ago I had the great gift of being invited into the bedroom of my friend David Sacks, born in 1968 just like me but brought to the end of his life by cancer that, by the time it was discovered, had erupted throughout his body. After a glorious and grace-filled year of life made possible by medical treatment, David's illness outran the drugs. In his last days he lay on his bed. His body was now unbearably thin and weak. David was an internationally celebrated photographer, but he would never make another image. He had sent me countless text messages over the years, but now he was beyond text messaging. He had created a Facebook group where he and his wife, Angie, chronicled the story of his cancer diagnosis, treatment, and all the ups and downs that followed, but he would never again update it.

But he was still there, still with us, still able, just barely, to hear us praying and singing—able, in moments of lucidity, to open his eyes, take in the small group of family and friends gathered around his bed and know he was not alone. His brother brought a guitar and we sang, several nights in a row, Matt Redman's song "10,000 Reasons."

The technology was over. The easy-everywhere dream had ended. Now we could only be here, in our own vulnerable bodies, present to the immensely hard reality of a friend, father, son, and husband dying. Over the bed was a framed, calligraphed rendering of David and Angie's wedding vows.

It was one of the hardest places I have ever been. It was one of the most holy places I have ever been. It was one of the best places I have ever been.

We are meant to build this kind of life together: the kind of life that, at the end, is completely dependent upon one another; the kind of life that ultimately transcends, and does not need, the easy solutions of technology because it is caught up in something more true and more lasting than anything our technological world can invent. We are meant to die in one another's arms, surrounded by prayer and song, knowing beyond knowing that we are loved. We are meant for so much more than technology can ever give us—above all, for the wisdom and courage that it will never give us. We are meant to spur one another along on the way to a better life, the life that really is life.

Why not begin living that life, together, now?

A Friendship Bench is quite literally a park bench—with a higher calling. In Zimbabwe, friendship benches are located on the grounds of medical clinics around major cities. They're a safe place where trained community members counsel folks struggling with what they, in the local Shona language, call kufungisisa ("thinking too much") or what Americans call depression.

Dr. Dixon Chibanda, a psychiatrist at the University of Zimbabwe, came up with the name Friendship Bench back in 2006. In Zimbabwe, as in most places, there's a lot of stigma around mental illness. Chibanda figured out that while people were hesitant to head to a mental clinic and speak with a medical professional about their mental health, they were generally willing to sit on a park bench and share their worries with someone within their own community. At these benches, community counselors and patients meet weekly to discuss intimate issues—and develop a plan to overcome difficulties.

The strategy seems to be working. According to a study that tracked 573 patients with anxiety or depression for a six-month period, only 13 percent of those who participated in the Friendship Bench program still had symptoms of depression.

B.J. Miller was a sophomore at Princeton when, one Monday night in November 1990, he and two friends slipped out for drinks and then decided to climb a commuter train parked at the adjacent rail station, for fun. When Miller got to the top, electrical current arced out of a piece of equipment into the watch on his wrist. Eleven-thousand volts shot through his left arm and down his legs. When his friends reached him on the roof of the train, smoke was rising from his feet.

Miller remembers none of this. His memories don't kick in until several days later, when he woke up in the burn unit of St. Barnabas Medical Center, in Livingston, N.J. Doctors took each leg just below the knee, one at a time. Then they turned to his arm, which triggered in Miller an even deeper grief. For weeks, the hospital staff considered him close to death. But Miller, in a devastated haze, didn't know that. He only worried about who he would be when he survived. For a long time, no visitors were allowed in his hospital room; the burn unit was a sterile environment.

But on the morning Miller's arm was going to be amputated, just below the elbow, he describes a moving scene of support and grace from his community of friends: a dozen friends and family members packed into a 10-foot-long corridor between the burn unit and the elevator, just to catch a glimpse of him as he was rolled to surgery. "They all dared to show up," Miller later said. "They all dared to look at me. They were proving that I was lovable even when I couldn't see it."

In his New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a book length letter to his adolescent son, Samori. It's a brutally honest warning to his son about how hard it will be for him to grow up as an African-American male. "Racism," Coates writes, "is a visceral experience" which rips at the black body. Does he hope that things will get better? No. Hope is "specious," Coates says, and he makes it clear that he has no hope in God or the church.

Yet toward the end of the book he recounts a conversation with Dr. Mabel Jones, a devout Christian and the child of sharecroppers in rural Louisiana. Dr. Jones went on to serve in the Navy and become a successful radiologist. She had a daughter and a son named Prince, who became a friend of Coates. One evening a police officer confused Prince with another African American young man and shot and killed him. As Coates listened to Dr. Jones talk of what the church meant to her in the midst of suffering and injustice he writes,

I thought of my own distance from an institution that has, so often, been the only support of our people. I often wonder if in that distance I've missed something, some notions of cosmic hope, some wisdom beyond my mean physical perception of the world, something beyond the body, that I might have transmitted to you. I wondered that … because something beyond anything I have ever understood drove Mabel Jones to an exceptional life.

The British novelist Julian Barnes tried to capture the loneliness of what he calls "grief-work." After thirty years of marriage, his wife Pat died from a brain tumor. Barnes was struck by how many of his closest friends didn't know how to talk honestly about his grief. Barnes said, "Some friends are as scared of grief as they are of death; they avoid you as if they fear infection." One friend advised him to get a dog. Some other friends suggested that he go on a long vacation. Barely a week after his wife's funeral, another friend cheerily asked, "So, what are you up to? Are you going on walking holidays?"

Barnes also describes the friends who can't even bring themselves to mention his wife's name. He calls them "the Silent Ones." Barnes writes:

I remember a dinner conversation in a restaurant with three married friends …. Each had known her for many years …. I mentioned her name; no one picked it up. I did it again, and again nothing. Perhaps the third time I was deliberately trying to provoke …. Afraid to touch her name, they denied her thrice, and I thought the worse of them for it.

Barnes imagines that these Silent Ones really want to say, "Your grief is an embarrassment. We're just waiting for it to pass. And, by the way, you're less interesting without her."

John Knight and Denise Knight were happily anticipating the birth of their first child, a son. They had already decided to name him Paul. But when Paul was born, there was a big problem: Paul was born without eyes. John and Denise would later discover that their son had other serious issues, including severe autism and a growth hormone deficiency.

Two months after Paul's birth, as John was looking at his son hooked up to tubes and sensors and surrounded by medical professionals, he quietly told God, "God, you are strong, that's true, and you are wicked. You are mean. Do it to me—not to this boy. What did he ever do to you?" Shortly after that prayer, John and Denise quit going to church.

But one couple from the church refused to give up on them. Karl and Gerilyn never pressured John and Denise about spiritual issues. Instead, they would often stop by and leave simple gifts, like a loaf of fresh bread or a basket of soap and shampoo for Denise. John said that it was like Karl and Gerilyn were saying, "I notice you. I see you. I know you're hurting and I love you."

Eventually John and Denise accepted a dinner invitation from Karl and Gerilyn. During dinner John told Karl, "You can believe whatever you want. I don't care. I have evidence that God is cruel." Karl softly replied, "I love you, John. I have regard for you, and I love your boy."

Karl and Gerilyn's four children also displayed unconditional love for their son. John described it this way:

They'd throw [my son] up in the air and make him laugh and do funny bird sounds and—and that was confounding, because most people, most adults couldn't do that. And so I would have this extraordinary expression of love and affection at the dinner table here, and I would turn to my left—and there would be at least one of these children playing with my boy like he was a real boy. I wasn't even sure he was a real boy at times.

Based on this family's quiet, persistent love, John and Denise finally returned to the Lord and to their local church. And when they returned Karl and Gerilyn stayed by their side, making sure their son made it into the nursery. John would later say, "They persisted. That was a big deal that they persisted with us."

Jean Vanier, founder of the L'Arche communities, told the following story about persevering in our practice of unconditional love:

I know a man who lives in Paris. His wife has Alzheimer's. He was an important businessman—his life filled with busyness. But he said that when his wife fell sick, "I just couldn't put her into an institution, so I kept her. I fed her. I bathed her." I went to Paris to visit them, and this businessman who had been very busy all his life said, "I have changed. I have become more human." I got a letter from him recently. He said that in the middle of the night his wife woke him up. She came out of the fog for a moment, and she said, "Darling, I just want to say thank you for all you've doing for me." Then she fell back into the fog. He told me, "I wept and I wept."

Sometimes Christ calls us to love people who cannot love us in return. They live in the fog of mental illness, disabilities, poverty, or spiritual blindness. As we serve them, we may only receive fleeting glimpses of gratitude. But just as Jesus has loved us in the midst of our spiritual confusion, so we continue to love others as they walk through a deep fog.

Fred Winters, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Maryville, Illinois, was shot and killed during a Sunday service on March 8, 2009, by a troubled young man. A week after the tragic event, his wife, Cindy Winters, was interviewed by Julie Chen of CBS's Early Show. When asked about her husband's alleged killer, Terry Sedlacek, Winters spoke only a message of forgiveness—a message quite fitting for the Easter season:

I do not have any hatred, or even hard feelings towards him. We have been praying for him. One of the first things that my daughter said to me after this happened was, "You know, I hope that he comes to learn to love Jesus through all of this." We are not angry at all, and we really firmly believe that he can find hope and forgiveness and peace through this, by coming to know Jesus. And we hope that that happens for him.

In her book Living Beyond Yourself: Exploring the Fruit of the Spirit, author and speaker Beth Moore recalls a particularly insightful moment in her life:

I will never forget watching an evening talk show featuring the story of the parents and killer of a young college student. The killer was his best friend. The weapon was high alcohol content inside a speeding automobile. …

What made this particular feature prime-time viewing? The parents had forgiven the young driver… And if that was not enough, they had taken him in as their own. This young man sat at the table in the chair which was once occupied by their only son. He slept in the son's bed. He worked with the victim's father, teaching seminars on safety. He shared their fortune and supported their causes. He spoke about the one he had slain in ways only someone who knew him intimately could have. …

Why did these parents do such a thing? Because it gave them peace. The interviewer was amazed; I was amazed. I kept trying to put myself in the parents' position—but I could not. Then, as the tears streamed down my cheeks, I heard the Spirit of God whisper to my heart and say: "No wonder you cannot relate. You have put yourself in the wrong position. You, my child, are the driver." God was the parent who not only forgave, but also invited me to sit at His table in the space my Savior left for me. As a result, I have peace.

One Sunday at my church, the choir had finished singing the anthem and the pastor was rising to deliver the message. It was a moment of holy expectation.

Suddenly, a teenage girl, third from the left on the front row of the choir, rose and stepped out across her fellow choir members and around the piano. Clad in maroon robe and gold stole, she made her way down the steps and toward the side aisle.

I thought, If she is going to leave, she should go out the back.

But she was not leaving. She made her way to the fourth row of pews, sat down next to her friend and gently placed her arm around her.

Then I knew. Twelve hours earlier her friend had lost her grandmother, who had been suffering from an illness. Her friend came to church to restore her strength through worship. Arriving late, she found an open pew to herself.

As Leslie sat next to Bethany and gently hugged her, those in the congregation smiled and shed small tears of joy, of love for the friend who showed Christ's love through a simple act of companionship. She risked causing a distraction to minister to a friend.

Such are the small acts of kindness and love that are the fabric of a congregation.

The pastor delivered a strong message that day. So did Leslie.

A few winters ago, heavy snows hit North Carolina. Following a wet, six-inch snowfall, it was interesting to see the effect along Interstate 40. Next to the highway stood several large groves of tall, young pine trees. The branches were bowed down with the heavy snow--so low that branches from one tree were often leaning against the trunk or branches of another.

Where trees stood alone, however, the effect of the heavy snow was different. The branches had become heavier and heavier, and since there were no other trees to lean against, the branches snapped. They lay on the ground, dark and alone in the cold snow. When the storms of life hit, we need to be standing close to other Christians. The closer we stand, the more we will be able to hold up.