The Things We Carry

In high school, I had to read this book called “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. Well lets be honest, it was more like skim for good quotes then Google the synopsis. In the book O’Brien lists physical items that the soldiers carried throughout the Vietnam War. These physical items are direct links to the emotional baggage the soldiers carried with them throughout and after the war. Don’t worry, you’re not about to have to read my B- essay on the book.

No matter how often I cast it, sometimes once a day – sometimes every hour of a day, my kidney situation is a burden. From having to wake up at 5 am for dialysis three times a week to taking around 20 pills a day, its just not fun. BUT what annoys me more than the burden of my own situation is others who discard their own situation because theirs is not on the same scale or magnitude. I have gotten told too many times “I couldn’t imagine what you are going through”. To which my response is ”Good, you aren’t supposed to be trying to imagine being where I am, God gave you your own situation for a reason”. Another major pet peeve is the phrase “Yeah _____ happened and now I have to deal with ______ (then the person frantically corrects themselves) BUT IT IS NOTHING LIKE WHAT YOU ARE GOING THROUGH”. It makes me feel like I am standing there listening to other people’s problems and judging if their situation is hard enough or not.

The phrase that He will never put on you more than you can bear, is strictly that, a phrase. It’s not in the Bible. If God never gave us more than we could bear, then we wouldn’t need Him. His whole goal is to give us situations that are more than we can handle so that we realize that we cannot do this on our own. But at the same time the situations He gives us are not meant to destroy us. They are tailored specifically so that when they are finished we come out stronger and better than before. Sometimes the things we carry cause some scars that remind us of what we carried and the war we carried those things through.

Many war veterans have a chest under their bed or in their attic filled with the things they carried. Personally, I won’t be able to take this whole kidney thing and hide it away in a box as a faint memory of something I used to carry. I am going to put it on display on my (hypothetical) mantle for all to see. At the end of the day that’s the reason any of us go through what we go through. So that we can find someone else who is hurting or struggling to carry their own burden or weight and tell them the testimony of what God brought us through.

There’s that children’s song “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine, let it shine” and everyone always relates that light to being the Truth. But that light is also hope, hope that one day things will get better. Hope that there is more than just pain and suffering. So here is my light, shining bright. It’s time to share yours.