You remember the birthdays. Both sides of the family, and the dates of things, and which cousin cannot be seated near which other cousin.
You notice when something has gone wrong between you and you are the one who comes back into the room afterward. You have done that, by my rough count from what you have described, several hundred times.
And you reach. When there is a silence you are the one who breaks it, when there is a distance you are the one who crosses it, and you have never once had the experience of somebody crossing it toward you.
That is what carrying both ends means. And you have done it well enough for long enough that nobody in your house has noticed it is happening.
Before anything else, one thing that has to be said and cannot be softened.
If the person you live with frightens you, controls you, hurts you, or has made you smaller and more afraid than you used to be, then none of what follows applies and I am not going to wrap it in the language of promises. That is not a marriage carried alone, and nobody who cares about you would tell you to keep absorbing it. Talk to somebody qualified where you live, this week, and if there is danger in that house, contact an emergency service or a domestic violence line today.
For everybody else, and it is most people who arrive at a page like this: this is about being tired in a house where nobody is frightening anybody, which is its own real thing.
The instruction was never given to one person
There is a short line in Galatians that is usually read as a duty and I want you to read it as an arrangement.
Bear ye one another's burdens (Galatians 6:2, King James Version)
Bear ye. Plural. The instruction is given to a group, not to an individual, and it describes something moving in more than one direction.
The design in that sentence is that a load gets distributed. Not that one strong person carries the community. That everybody takes some.
You are living outside an arrangement scripture assumes, and Galatians has never once described a burden as one person's job. Galatians 6:2 puts the bearing in the plural and moves it in both directions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman notice she has been the only one lifting.
And notice what that means about your tiredness. It is not a character failure. It is the entirely predictable result of one person doing something designed for several.
You have been doing the work of a group on your own, and no verse has ever once suggested that a person could sustain that. The passage assumes a distribution of weight, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells somebody her exhaustion is arithmetic rather than weakness.
Where the help was supposed to come from
Let me be careful here, because there is a wrong turn available and I do not want either of us to take it.
The wrong turn is to say your husband should have been the other end. Maybe. I do not know your house, I have not met him, and this site does not adjudicate marriages.
What I can say is that the arrangement in Galatians is not a marriage arrangement. It is a community one. Bear ye one another's burdens is written to a church, which is to say to a group of people who are not married to each other.
Which means the second end of your load was never supposed to come from one man. It was supposed to come from a handful of people who know what is going on.
And nobody knows what is going on.
You have been short of the very thing the verse describes, and the shortfall has never once been located where you have been looking for it. Galatians 6:2 addresses a community and not a couple, and the Holy Spirit is the one who redirects a woman's expectation to the place help was actually meant to come from.
You were promised to and you promised, and the covenant has never once obliged you to be the only person carrying it in this world. It is written that we bear one another's burdens, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a load starts moving off one back.
Tell one person, this week
Here is the assignment, and it is the only one this row gives, and there is a reason it is this and not something braver.
Tell one person the truth about how alone this has been.
One. Chosen because they can hear something without immediately telling you what to do about it. A friend of long standing. A pastor, if that is a safe person in your case. A counselor.
And tell them a sentence, not a history. Something like: I have been carrying this on my own for a long time and I have not said that to anybody.
You are not telling them so they can fix it. You are telling them so that the load stops being carried in a place where the verse cannot reach it.
You are able to hand one end to one person, and it has never once been necessary to hand over the whole of it at once. Galatians 6:2 puts the bearing in the plural, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present the moment a burden becomes visible to a second human being.
If nobody comes to mind, that is information, not a verdict. Somebody qualified counts, and often counts more.
Here is what I believe is going out over somebody this evening.
You are not weak for being tired, and twenty years of doing the work of several people has never once been a character failure. Galatians 6:2 says bear ye one another's burdens, and it is the Holy Spirit, not my telling you, who shows a woman that her exhaustion is arithmetic.
And this, which is what I came with.
You have permission to let one end down into somebody else's hands, and it has never once been faithlessness to do it. The word puts the bearing in the plural and gives it to a community, and the same Spirit who moved Galatians is standing in your kitchen this evening.
Tell one person. One sentence.
Declare this over yourself
- Weight of both ends at once, you were never a load for one person. Galatians 6:2 says bear ye one another's burdens in the plural, so by the Holy Spirit I tell one person this week, in the name of Jesus.
- Embarrassment about an arrangement I built myself, you have no standing in this kitchen. The word gives the bearing to a community rather than to a solitary carrier, and by the Spirit of God I am finished confusing loneliness with faithfulness and finished pretending I am not tired from the reaching.
- Father, You wrote that instruction to a group and You never handed this to one back. Your word says bear ye one another's burdens, so by Your Spirit I tell one trusted person the truth about how alone the carrying has been.
Galatians 6:2
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