I embrace the concept. I want to lead a load-bearing life. But as I often bring up in counseling sessions, it’s those nagging ambivalences that are our undoing. So in all honesty, only part of me aspires to a load-bearing life—the lofty part wooed by the higher calling. The other part would just like it easy and comfortable. Who really likes sweat? Actually there seem to be such creatures.

I want the character that sustains the heaviness of adversity. I want patience, self-control, and forbearance. I also want to play Chopin and Mozart, and performing in Carnegie Hall would have been nice!

I always seem to go back to my hero, the man Moses. In my estimation, he exemplifies a load-bearing life. I have admired Moses and studied his life since I was a child. His humanity is always evidence, but his extraordinary boldness as he faces Pharaoh over and over, his vision for going to the promised land, his love for the wining, unfaithful Israelites, and his tenacity, have all spoken volumes to me.

Some adversity has been unleashed in our day that I believe only those with load-bearing lives will be able to sustain the pressures of our day. Stephen, in another sermon, said, “Passion is not enough. Vision is not enough. We need character to sustain the vision.” My spirit and my mind both knew he was speaking truth. We, as a nation, have seen this principle all too well in our political leaders.

I encourage myself and I encourage you to learn into the Word. Lean into prayer. Lean into a personal relationship with Almighty God. As we hold up our end of the load, He lifts us up. I love that promise: “He is the lifter of my head.” I pray that a lot and find great comfort in it.

The roots in this case are limited by the pot. When this occurs, the roots don’t stop growing. They just can’t grow deeper. They now grow in a lateral position and begin to grow in a circular pattern. Literally they go in circles. They are restricted and end in a condition known as “root-bound.”

Of course, that revelation got my mind off and running. True to form, I began going through the files in my mind searching for where I might be root bound. I thought about the application in relation to individuals, marriages, churches, businesses, and so on.

Many things can restrict ones growth. Fear is one of the major restrictive forces that can cause a life to be “root bound.” Fear can stop you. It binds, limits, and restricts. Fear holds you back from pursuing your dreams, paralyzes your ability to seek options, and stops you from being honest with yourself and others. Fear comes in so many colors. It is like those mega-boxes of crayons containing a huge variety of shades of the same color.

Another example of a major restrictor is unforgiveness. This “pot” holds back growth in relationships, keeping them from deepening. Many couples are “root-bound” around an offense in the past. They can no longer seek deeper soil that contains love, intimacy, hope, and vision for a future together.

On a large scale, what about churches who are bound by tradition? “We’ve always done it that way” thinking can be a fierce pot for roots to push against. “What will people say?” It all leads to stagnation and growth stops.

I believe the plant wants to grow. If the pot is too small, then the plant has no choice. The plant can’t change its own pot. Someone who cares about the plant has to buy a bigger pot, add soil, and do the repotting.

We are blessed by such a One. We have a connection with the Tender, the Planter, the Gardener of the universe. God wants to repot us, to free us from the things binding our hearts. Do you have an area in your life where you need a larger pot? Fresh soil?

Where have you stagnated with sameness and become dull and apathetic? A root-bound plant will eventually quit creating blossoms. And ultimately it will die. I think of Joshua in Deuteronomy 30: “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life…”

Go get that bigger pot today and some bags of fresh soil. Your life depends on it.

Then our church held this conference on Y2K and the possibilities of computer glitches when the year 2000 rolls over and the great opportunities that could be afforded us. If you read the Sunday Tennessean, you surely saw the front page article. The intrusive thoughts provided by all this just upbraided that family tree I was musing about.

I was forced once again in life to face the possibilities of reshuffling the deck of my life. This is where you have your cards kind of lined up nicely in the deck and somebody says, “I think I’ll cut ‘em.” First thing you know, they’re messing up that neat pile.

This has happened many times in my life as well as yours, I’m sure, in big and small ways, like the day my husband turned 32. He was going to stop by the doctor’s office before going to pick up his birthday cake at the bakery. He was the minister for a church in Kentucky and I had invited a large number of the church over for a party. When he walked in the door with his cake, he asked me to sit down with him. I remember sitting in his lap while he told me through tears that the doctor had received a report back from his surgery the week before and he had a very serious type of cancer. He had painted a very bleak picture. The room reeled and our party turned into a sober prayer vigil.

The deck was cut and we had to play them. Our cards were shuffled. We had 3 little boys—nearly 2, 4, and 6. All plans were laid aside. We got very focused on our priorities: spending time together, looking for a specialist to do radical surgery, and praying a lot. Things that seemed to matter a lot just a few days earlier now hardly mattered at all. This may sound morbid, but the prognosis was so poor, that we began to think and talk a lot about heaven. I remember sitting up at night and singing about heaven from our hymn books. Truly setting our minds on things above.

Crises, whether tornadoes, serious illness, loss of a job, or whatever else, have a way of bringing into sharp focus what really matters. Times of crisis really get our priorities reshuffled, and times of ease seem to find us quite fuzzy on important things (usually people) in our lives. I was just studying Jeremiah recently, one of my favorite books, and reading God’s observation that the Israelites were drinking out of broken cisterns instead of the fresh water. He provided. And I thought, “Well, there we are, that’s America.” Of course, God would then provide a crisis to bring the people back.

Whether Y2K is God’s provision to get people back to the fresh water source, I can’t say yet, but I do know there are principles learned in crisis that seem to be forgotten in easy times. I know when we often had no water in Africa I thought, “I will never, ever turn on a faucet when I get home without giving thanks.” But you know what? Over the years I began to take that for granted. My husband has now passed his 50th birthday and you know what? There are times I even take him for granted.

Moses so often had to tell the children of Israel to remember. He reminded them often of God’s faithfulness and their unfaithfulness. I wonder why they kept forgetting. And they seemed to forget so easily. Kind of like that sheep analogy… forgetting to follow the shepherd, getting distracted with the next little patch of grass over there by the craggy rocks.

Today we are easily distracted by so much. Baubles. Endless baubles. Mesmerized people. Walking in trance. Suddenly the siren sounds and we wake up. The Almighty interrupts, says “I’d like to cut the deck” and disrupts our game with His.

Thank you Lord for your unfailing love, Your mercy and patience with us. We are a stiff-necked, forgetful people. But You have promised if we humble ourselves and call on You. You will heal our land.

I love a book written many years ago by a local Nashvillian who is now deceased. Bob Benson, author of Come Share the Being, infused us with a glimpse of reality in being invited to share in the very being of God. He said this is about our “being”: “I am the measure of the truth I have adopted and I have believed these things until there is no distance between me and them.”

In daily practical terms, when your marriage seems so entangled that you can’t see how to possibly untangle it, just Do The Next Right Thing! Take out the garbage that’s piled up or speak some word of encouragement or forgiveness. Be kind. Just do the next right simple thing that presents itself. If your finances are in a horrible mess, just pay a little on some bill that’s due and refrain from the extra eating out spree. Just the next little right thing.

If you have a big project in front of you, just take some little next step. It might be a phone call, or picking up a sheet of paper and a pen and beginning somewhere. When you are paralyzed and overwhelmed, just say the next right words in prayer: “Lord, please help me.” Many right tiny steps aligned, help you tunnel through the mountain, make headway on the journey, and provide breakthroughs in a drowning relationship. Yes, faithfulness in little things adds up. Get started today!

The transition from Southern lady in an apron to the Sumo wrestler commences, like Clark Kent in the telephone booth working his costume change. Now the Sumo wrestler wrestles her dough to the ground. This upper body workout requires concentration, a commitment to the end product, and a considerable amount of expended energy. Otherwise the fruit of your labors is not very rewarding.

When I first began musing on the concept of kneading, it was after September 11, when another level of vulnerability was penetrated. The brain is much like a big file cabinet and this new unwanted event had to be filed. The struggle to create a new file began. Should it go under “1000 New Things to Fear” or “God is still in control”? Along with the rupture came the collision of new and old fears and hopes. What would be kneaded into my soul? I discovered anew, it was up to me.

To decide what to knead into one’s soul, it is best to know what end product is desired. We are all kneading all of the time. Some of the yeast we are kneading into our soulish bread; however, appears to be chosen more from habit than deliberate choice.

It is a good thing to deliberate, to stop and think and choose what we knead. Because, as in the bread analogy, what we knead, will permeate. It will be revealed in the aroma, the physical presentation, and the texture of our lives.

If you have ever been around someone who kneads fear, you will notice how many things they can find to be fearful about. It is unlimited, that is, the possibilities of fearful things from which to choose. Those who choose to knead unforgiveness are still singing the “somebody done me something wrong song” twenty years later. They still own a record by that name and an old outdated record player and have never even investigated a new phenomenon called a CD. Toxic yeast in the form of fear, disappointments, judgments, bitterness, and the like is readily available on the shelves of the Real Life Grocery Store.

But there are other forms of yeast that could be kneaded into our souls that would produce a loaf of bread from which many could taste and many could be satisfied. Of all Jesus’ metaphors (a door, a light, a road) maybe the strangest is Jesus comparing himself to a loaf of bread, called the ‘bread of life.’

Jesus began this discussion with the crowd by telling them, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life…” John 6:27. He goes on to declare: “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.” V. 35. Later in the discourse, Jesus says, “This is the bread that came down from heaven… he who feeds on this bread will live forever.” V. 58. The final thing I would note in the passage is Jesus’ declaration: “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.”

If we work on the words and concepts we are kneading into our lives, not only will we find our own souls more satisfied, we will find it natural to speak these things to others. They will taste and see our bread and be satisfied. If we knead in the yeast packets of life-giving principles, those of hope, faith, love, forgiveness, grace, and gratitude, our texture and aroma will be a blessing to those who taste. Psalms 1 speaks of the man “whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates (kneads) day and night.” The outcome of this kneading is “he is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.” What an outcome of purposeful kneading!!

In spiritual terms I would say that you, the helper, have been presented with an opportunity to be a vessel through which God’s love can flow. You can be His feet, His hands, show His gentleness, kindness, patience to your journeymate. In other words, the fruit of the spirit can be used to minister to your mate.

Think about it. You will have more opportunities to minister to your mate than any other person in your whole life. You have a single goal… to see that with all that is in your power, they reach the destination with you. Please do not confuse this and garble the message with all the codependency teachings on rescuing. Certainly, you are not the Savior, and there are limits to what you can do. I am speaking to what is in your power to do. At each need, hurt, etc., you can choose to respond with the love of God to minister to your mate. You can choose to stop, look, and listen.

I speak out of 32 years of marriage experiences. My husband had no conception of the opportunities that he would be presented with, to sit up and listen till the wee hours of the morning, no conception of the number of tears he would wipe away. But as God’s love continued to flow through him to me, a wondrous thing took place through the years: healing, mending of the soul, and bruises disappeared from my childhood. Trust was built. Love matured. The planks were put in place, building a bridge between us.

This picture sounds much like the story of the Good Samaritan. Finding one on life’s journey, picking them up alongside the road, ministering to their woundedness with tender care. Costly, sacrificially , and unselfishly.

I was walking along the road one day and met a man. He said, “I would like to walk with you> But I said to him “Oh, but you see, I have this hole in my soul and it could be painful to walk with me. I will slow you down so much and so often. But he said to me, “That’s really no problem because I love you and furthermore, I know the Soul-Mender. And each time you hurt, I will take you to Him again, and again, and again…”

The benefits of single-spaced living are there for the taking. Most of these have to do with avoidance of pain. If one runs hard enough and fast enough on the hamster wheel of life one won’t have to feel the discomfort of the spaces. There is not time to remember, or regret, or bring to the surface the pain of loss and disappointment. No time for a quiet dinner alone or otherwise. Good. Then there’s no time to feel the lack of cultivating relationships with self, God, or fellow man. No time to plow that land or till that oil.

Are you kidding? There’s not even time to find the seed packet. Sorry. That’s enough of that. No time to think such depressing thoughts. The phone is ringing after all. Got to go. G.O. A word for our time. Shake, rattle, and roll. It feels like living. Hmmm…

There’s another side of this debate. For in fact, there are also benefits to the double-spaced life. I have recently rediscovered some of life’s best reasons in a season of double, and if you will, triple-spaced living. It came with the hospitalization of our daughter-in-law as she waited for the arrival of twins.

Waiting in a hospital bed for twins to mature provided days akin to watching grass grow for Cindy. But for me it provided many more hours with their two and four-year-olds. Life slowed down to the pace of tiny feet and to the unsure grasp of tiny fingers.

Spaces provide time to actually see life in details that would be otherwise missed, an opportunity to feel all the feelings in the kaleidoscope of life, a chance to remember the painful and celebrate the wonderful. I encourage you to take those single lines and pry them apart. (Do you remember the way we used to put a stick in the window to keep it up?)

Once you have a space between the lines of your life, inhabit that space with sheer abandon. Let your senses have at it! Dance your life-dance as though it were your last!

The adultery sequence is a sly one. Once the rewrite begins, the mate will come under microscopic analysis through a critical filter. Every detail and frailty will be carefully noted just as a detective carefully collects evidence. This is extremely necessary so that one is totally justified and has the necessary fodder to feed the rationalization process. Otherwise a person would have to feel like a cheat and a traitor—and that would certainly be uncomfortable.

The fantasy itself is an interesting phenomenon. It holds out promises of filling deep holes left from some time in the past, holes that cannot be filled from an external source, even by a mate. If a young girl’s father left the family, then got caught up in his new life, and continually broke his promises, she is going to be left with a gaping hole. Her future husband can be nurturing and enhanced her healing, but it may never be enough. The ultimate healing is not from the outside in but from the inside out.

Until the pieces get properly placed and Father God is properly aligned at the center of the internal universe, the search is in vain. People will be a part of the healing, but if they are at the center, they will be as useful in the end as the golden calf was to the Israelites.

I must sound a warning. Fantasies around relationships, especially illicit relationships, ultimately are bound to disappoint. The idealizations are too perfect, too far from reality. Fantasies lie to you. They set you up. They are extremely unfair to the flesh-and-blood human you are married to. He or she has no chance to compete with the ideal. So when and if a fantasy begins, be quick to flee, quick to identify this secret thought-life. Run for cover!

Here’s the map I believe that I and other yearning sojourners must follow in attempts to grow up: “Make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness knowledge; and to knowledge self-control; and to self-control perseverance; and to perseverance godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” II Peter 1:5-7.

This passage is followed with a promise: “For if these things are yours and abound, you will neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

I have thought a lot over the years about the marks of maturity. I do come down to a few bottom lines. I know that the mature person handles disappointment differently than an immature person. I know that the mature person is able to keep the context and big picture of situations present instead of the small tunnel vision present in immaturity. I challenge you to face your own version of immaturity and how it affects those whom you love. I encourage my own soul and yours to keep this business of growing up. It can only benefit us individually, benefit those with whom we are in relationships, and the body of Christ in becoming the pure bride prepared to meet her groom.