“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30). In the animated film Hercules, when the mule hurts its leg the young Hercules tosses the mule onto the cart with his father, takes up the yoke and then travels at a blinding speed to the market. I imagine that if we were to take upon us the yoke of Jesus Christ and Jesus was to pull the yoke with all of His might and as fast as we can, it would look a little like that scene in Hercules. But the beautiful thing is that Christ condescends to our level. He meets us where we are at and matches our speed. As much as we might sometimes like for the Savior to drag us along behind the cart as He blazes through all of the trials we are to face, He will not rob us of our chance to give it all we’ve got as we face the tests and trials before us. Jesus can not only give us rest, but after we’ve done all we can do, He will take care of the rest. His yoke is easy not because we can kick back and watch him do all the work, but because we can push with all of our might against the yoke and have confidence that our efforts will not be in vain. We can know that when we are yoked together with the Savior and we are doing everything that we can do, we will move forward. We can push harder and dig deeper and leave it all out on the line because we know that we will succeed with Him by our side. It is bad enough that we try to push against an immovable burden feeling all alone and helpless but then when we add the extra burden of worrying that we will inevitably fail and that all of our efforts will have been wasted, that is what makes it extra hard and extra heavy. But when we take upon us the Savior’s yoke, it is lighter because we don’t have to carry on all of that extra weight of worry and anxiety and fear. I am incredibly grateful that Jesus Christ, even with His ten thousand horsepower engine, is willing to hitch himself to my one mule with a twisted ankle power, and He is perfectly willing to putter along at one mile per hour with me, making sure that however fast or slow I am going, He is still making sure that we are pushing the burden along. I know I’m not always advancing to where the Savior would like me to be as fast as He would like me to be there, nor am I getting there even as fast as I myself wish I could be there, but I am so blessed that on all of the days that I choose to take upon myself His yoke, we do end up moving forward a little bit more.
