Bearing Each Other’s Burdens

Growing Daily

Bearing Each Other’s Burdens

Our prayer group has been praying for a gravely ill woman for months. One day, as I left the hospital after yet another bleak visit, I found myself crying out, “Lord, we’ve prayed and prayed, and nothing is changing!”

Then I heard a still, small voice reply: “Yes—but you are changing.”  I knew it was true. Day after day, praying a prayer not yet answered, I had grown in compassion and perseverance.

Others in the group have said the same: we are being changed, shaped by bearing a burden together that is too heavy to carry alone. And now, months later, we’re beginning to see fruit—not physical healing (yet)—but something more important. Spiritual blossoming in a woman once weighed down by despair. Her eyes are no longer fixed solely on her illness. She’s even praying for us now!

Perhaps this is a glimpse of what we read in James 5:16: honesty and prayer with each other “so that you [plural] may be healed.” We know too that God restored Job after he prayed for friends who were not in a place to pray for themselves (Job 42:8-10).

So, today, again we pray, bearing each other’s burdens and so fulfilling “the law of Christ” in whom we “are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives...” (Galatians 6:2; Ephesians 2:21-22).


- Catherine Reid