Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."  ~Matthew 11

How do you spell relief?  There is this old 70’s or 80’s commercial that asks that questions.  The answer is R-O-L-A-I-D-S.  (Its scary how easily this rolls off my tongue, says something about liturgies and catechesis I think).  Rolaids spells relief.  How do you? 

I was talking to a friend this week, and we shared about our love of relief.  She talked about how caring for her parent in their late age has brought considerable challenges.  When confronted with these challenges, she found her drive to find relief and comfort intensified.  In these moments, eating, smoking a cigarette, binging a tv show would bring relief and escape.  I so identify with this.  I am a bit of a relief hound myself.  My personality type is an Enneagram 7, and the most basic need of a 7, is pain avoidance. In other words, “when the going gets tough,” 7’s say, “I’m out.” My out is relief seeking - eating, tv, twitter, travel.  Some of you know this too.  Your outs are probably different.  They may be the gym, the bike, the rock wall, a book or time alone.  The root however is the same — relief.  I just don’t want to deal with another crying session with my 2 year old.  I just don’t want to fight with my spouse over the same thing again.  I am so over this project at work, and the hours required to catch up.  Can someone around this house, pick anything up?  I wish I could say what I want to say to my mom, but instead I’ll just hit the gym.  When can I move on from this city, this house, this job, this culture, this... We all want relief.  How do you spell it? 

My counselor says relief is an idol.  An idol is a god of our own making.  A god that we worship. A god that we love.  A god that we hope in.  Relief is an idol.  In these moments of crisis, pain, fatigue or disappointment, we bank on relief for getting us through it.  Sure we pray and ask others to pray too, but at the end of the day, a glass of wine will at least do something.  In the garden, two trees — life and the knowledge of good and evil.  If you eat of the one, what will you get Eve? Adam? Relief.  Relief from not having what you wish you had; relief from the conflict.  I identify with that second one quite a bit.  I just don’t want the internal conflict, so I run to something that will provide me some sense of relief from that struggle.  Eve does the same.  As soon as you eat of it — relief.  How do you spell it?  What Adam wants is control and gratification, and that comes in relief from the control. So they look to the blessing and not the Bless-or. And that brings relief, but not rest. 

When we have a heavy burden, we find it hard to go anywhere.  We struggle and stammer and stumble. We seek relief, because our burdens are heavy.  I played golf yesterday.  The course was beautiful, set between two hills up from the California coast.  We played for $12 each. The one caveat — we had to walk.  No carts, too much rain on the course.  So we hoofed it.  I had my bag, and my yeti, and 7-8 miles of golf ahead of me.  By the 18th hole, my hip flexors and knees had had enough.  I was a beast of burden with bag and yeti.  The clubs certainly made my movement less agile, and the yeti cup was a constant working of setting down and picking up.  But the heart wants Coke Zero, so it was worth it.  Anyway, burdens make it harder.  But relief can’t remove the burden. Oh, it gives you a little bit of the feeling of control, which offers some form of respite from the burden, but it doesn’t remove it.  How can your remove the burden and find rest.

Jesus says come to me, and I will give you rest.  Not relief.  Rest.  What we really are after.  And the qualification for such good news is a heavy burden, which we all have.  He adds, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.  What’s interesting, is the yoke.  A yoke is what most of us work our whole lives to shed.  Our relief seeking is born in a greater search to throw off yokes.  You can’t tell me what to do — throw off the yoke.  I am who I am — throw off another yoke.  I will create my own path — yoke.  The yoke then just morphs, and most times gets tighter.  We get more constrained instead of the unstrained we think we are getting.  Jesus says He still has a yoke, but that yoke is easy, why?  Because we are yoked together with Him.  And he does all the lifting, the turning, the leading, the giving, and we get all the receiving.  He does good to us at His expense.  He is constrained, so that by being constrained to Him and His life, we become unstrained, yet still yoked to him.  Suddenly in Him, my burden is now His and now light. 

In our relief seeking, rest is what we really want.  It is the way to spell relief, and the key to gaining that is coming to Jesus.  But here’s the deal — this isn’t easy, because the water we swim in is really relief.  And it is our idol, and our hearts are experts at creating it.  So, how do we practice our way out of our relief seeking?  Well, I’m going to keep quoting my counselor, Jim.  We need to use our pain, our disappointment, our loss to move toward Jesus, not in relief, not in resolution, but revelation and rest.  Jim says we do that by groaning.  Groaning is the practice that the Apostle Paul talks about in Romans 8.  Groaning is the practice of coming to Jesus.  Jim says groaning squeezes out the life that is found in Romans 8:28 — we know that God works all of this for our good.  As we await redemption, we groan.  This is part prayer, part lament.  It might be singing too.  It is sitting into ourselves, our world, our situations — into these places where we really don’t have control, where we really feel out of control.  We sit into it.  We don’t try to run out of it to our phones, but sit into it and take it to Jesus by groaning.  Our pain moving us toward Jesus.  We stop fixing and instead fixate on Jesus by groaning to Him.  Paul says, the Spirit too groans with word and prayers too deep for our knowing and hearing, but that the Spirit’s groaning leads to Jesus interceding, and Jesus interceding leads to good working out of pain.  And good working in pain leads to among other things glorification, and glorification is a life where there is no separation from us and Jesus, which means — REST.  We groan, so we might rest.  We groan so we might come to Jesus.  This groaning may mean you purchase your first journal, and start writing out your groans, keeping place of your tears.  The Psalmist tells us that the Lord knows our tears, they are kept in his book.  Journaling can be a practice that helps us come to Jesus and restrains us gently from seeking control in other practices of relief.  I’m sure there are other ways to groan as well.  One way for me is simply to say Ugh, but not in despair, rather with eyes on in this life there are tribulations, and I don’t Ugh to ho-hum it away, but to put myself in the proper place — not running to the tree of Knowledge, but running to the tree of life.  I can’t fix this.  My ‘Ugh’ is my groan — the groan of no control, the groan of coming to Jesus, the groan of “please, slip your yoke on me,” here in the midst of my brokenness, this brokenness. I can’t do it, I can’t fix it — “Ugh, help me Jesus.” ‘Ugh’ your way to rest.  How do I spell relief?  U-G-H — Groaning words of hope in a broken world, I can’t see it, but I am coming to You who does.  May we find rest in the midst of our groaning to Jesus.  Practice groaning. 

~ Jusin Edgar