My husband and I went out to breakfast this morning. On our way back we went on a little side quest. We went down a road that goes through a rural area outside of the city limits. It goes through a little town called Vander. There is a legend about the railroad track that goes through there. The legend revolves around some spooky lights seen on the track. We had never been through there and decided to take a little tour.
But the Vander lights are not my point. It’s Sunday, and so as we drove down the road, there were a few churches along the way. I don’t know how it is in other states, but here, most of the churches have billboards out front with catchy sayings on them that either inspire, or cause you to laugh at some religious pun. One particular church billboard today was more thought-provoking. It said:
“God never puts heavy burdens on weak shoulders.”
My first reaction after reading that was to immediately think, yeah He does. Good grief there were some seriously heavy burdens that He put on my shoulders over the past several years. Like, really heavy. And I was most definitely a weak person.
But then I thought more about it. Was I really weak? I have always believed in the thought that God won’t give you anything you can’t handle. This billboard was saying pretty much the same thing. I may have seen myself as weak. But I don’t think God did. I think He saw in me the strength that I am only just now discovering.
My husband and I have differing opinions on bad things happening to us. He feels that it’s God punishing him. I feel that there is a reason for it. Or a lesson that we need to learn from it. It’s odd that our views on it differ like they do. He’s one of those “cradle Catholics” whose family was devout his whole life. I’m fairly new to the faith. Baptized as an infant, came fully into the church only a little more than 20 years ago.
Just some random thoughts on the presence of God in my life on the Lord’s Day. Kind of ironic that I was thinking about all of that while we were on a journey to see the location of what I’m sure was an un-godly phenomenon. To be fair, the leading theory on the Vander lights is that they are/were caused by swamp gas (even though there’s no swamp nearby, hmmm…).
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