My Yoke Is Easy

The Lord promises that His yoke is easy and his burden is light. I think if we look at the burdens that Christ has to bear, none of us would consider them light or easy, but He did. The Savior’s yoke is easy because He knows why He must bear this load. It’s not about Him, it’s about us. Therefore, when we are called to bear a heavy burden, the Lord can help make our burdens light, not by removing the weight, but by opening our eyes and our hearts and our minds to the real reason we have been called to bear this burden. We may think we are toiling in obscurity, that we are suffering without cause, that none notice or care, but this is simply not true. We are the light of the world. Others look to our example. If we are struggling financially, and yet we pay our tithing, we are making it easier for those with more money but less faith in the law of tithing to follow the Lord’s commands. When we go to a service project in poor health, we make it easier for those in good health but poor spirits to put their shoulder to the wheel and push along. When others look to our example and draw strength and inspiration and faith from our efforts, feeble and ineffectual though they may be, we can draw strength and inspiration and faith from them. It’s a two way street. Our burdens become lighter when we lighten the burdens of others. Our salvation is our individual responsibility, but we are all in this together and none of us are going to have the strength or the courage to get through this on our own. The Savior chose His metaphor carefully when He said that His yoke is easy. A yoke requires teamwork. We can look to others who are struggling worse than we are, and at the same time those same people can look to us and firmly believe that we are struggling worse than they are, and we can lighten one another’s burdens together. We make our struggles smaller when we realize that it’s not about us. God isn’t testing us in a vacuum. He gives us trials so that we can prove to ourselves that we are faithful, but more importantly, so that we can be held up as a shining example of faith to those around us. It is hard to struggle alone, but it makes the struggle more meaningful with the knowledge that we are not alone and that others are looking to us for strength and courage. This is how our hearts become knit together in love. We see our neighbor’s heart pierce with sorrow and it pierces our heart also, and the connecting thread of love knits our hearts together.