Unloading

We were on our way to a meeting. There were three of us in a green Pontiac. We passed a long line of 18-wheelers waiting at a weighing station. The driver at the front of the line was pulled over and unloading part of his load. He was over the weight limit.

What if there was a weighing station for us? Don’t suck in your stomach; I’m not talking about fat. I’m talking about a different kind of load. The kind that is hard to see. The kind that shows up in your eyes.

Imagine being pulled over periodically, stepping up on the scales and hearing some hairy-knuckle type say, “Sorry, but you’re carrying more than the maximum weight for a load-bearing rig of your make, model and year. You’ll have to unload the excess, put it on another carrier, or leave it behind. That’s the only way we’re going to let you back on the road.”

It could be guilt, or grief; shame, anger or disappointment…. It could be a truckload of good deeds. Overload is overload whether you’re carrying gold or garbage.

Lewis Grizzard’s father died, broken and cut-off, one Christmas.

“I asked daddy a thousand times, ‘What’s wrong? Why can’t you stay sober? What can be so bad you can’t talk about it?”

He began crying. I think he wanted to tell me. I think he wanted to tell somebody, but he never had the courage.

“I made a terrible mistake,” he said. “A bad mistake.”

“What did you do, daddy? Please tell me.”

“I made a terrible mistake,” he said.

“Did you kill somebody? Did you rob or cheat somebody? Were you a child molester; or guilty of cowardice?”

Whatever his sin, his secret, I loved him---and I loved him anyway.

Who in your life has the love and power to pull you over and say, “Enough! You’ve got to unload some of this. You are not safe.”

And who do you trust enough to pull over and unload the excess baggage?