The Route Without The Speed Bumps

There are two speed bumps on Wren Street and they are the reason Cassandra now drives an extra six minutes home every day.

The clunk happens over them. Only over them, or over anything like them, which in her neighborhood is basically Wren Street and one bad patch outside the school.

It started in May. And what Cassandra did about it, over the course of about two weeks of small decisions that never once felt like decisions, was rebuild her way home.

She goes out past the light instead of down Wren. This adds four minutes on a good day and eleven on a bad one, because it puts her onto a road that backs up.

She takes the long way to the school pickup, which adds two.

And she has stopped going to the store on the corner, because the entrance to its parking area has a raised strip, and now she goes to the bigger one, which is fine, and which is nine minutes further each way, and which she goes to twice a week.

Now here is what I want to put in front of her, and it is a job description.

Six minutes a day, five days a week. Thirty minutes. Plus eighteen minutes a week of extra store trips. Plus the planning, which she does not count and which is real: the small recalculation every single time she gets in the car about which way today is going.

That is about fifty minutes a week of driving and an unmeasurable amount of low grade mental work, all of it unpaid, all of it invisible, none of it on any list she keeps.

She has taken a second job. She did not apply for it, nobody offered it to her, and she is the only person on earth who knows she has it.

Her husband said, in August, "You know Wren's quicker."

And she said, "There's always traffic on Wren."

There is not always traffic on Wren. There is almost never traffic on Wren. And she heard herself say it, and he did not push it, and she thought about that sentence at intervals for the rest of the week.

A load that was never assigned to anybody

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to guess what that clunk is. I have not been in the car and I have no business guessing, and a woman at a distance offering a diagnosis about anything underneath a vehicle would be doing real harm. And if that car ever does anything on the road that feels wrong under your hands, this whole message steps aside and it goes to somebody qualified this week.

What I want to look at is the fifty minutes, and the sentence about the traffic.

Because there is a difference between a burden a person has been given and a burden a person has picked up, and Jesus is extremely precise about which one He is offering.

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 11:29-30

Now, that word easy is worth a moment, because in English it sounds like a claim about difficulty and it is not.

The word underneath it means well fitted. Kindly. Suited to the one wearing it. A yoke that is easy in that sense is a yoke a carpenter measured against the actual animal, so it does not rub, so it sits where it should, so the load goes through the frame instead of into the shoulder.

He is not saying the load is small. He is saying the load was made to fit.

And that is exactly what a self-assigned load is not. Nobody measured the extra fifty minutes a week against Cassandra. It was not designed for her, or by anyone, or at all. It accumulated.

You are not carrying a load anybody gave you, and Scripture describes the yoke of Christ as one that was fitted rather than one that was merely small. It is written that His yoke is easy and His burden light, which is a word about the making of it rather than the weight of it, and His Spirit is the one who makes that distinction usable on a Tuesday afternoon on Wren Street.

You have picked up something that was never assigned, and Matthew 11 puts the offer of rest right beside the taking on of a load rather than in place of it. The passage has the rest and the yoke in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that combination real rather than paradoxical.

The sentence about the traffic

Here is the part I want to be tender about, because it is the part she has actually been carrying.

The sentence to her husband was not a lie in the way that word usually means. She was not deceiving him about the car. If he had asked her directly whether there is a clunk on Wren Street she would have said yes immediately.

What she was defending was not the fact. It was the arrangement.

Because if the route becomes a topic, then the clunk becomes a topic, then the shop becomes a topic, then the number becomes a topic, and the whole carefully assembled system of small avoidances comes into a lit room where somebody can see the size of it.

And here is the thing about that. She built the system to keep the household calm, and the system is now the thing she has to defend, and defending it is its own work on top of the fifty minutes.

You were never asked to be the one who keeps everything smooth, and no verse anywhere hands a woman that job description. Matthew 11 has Jesus calling those who labor and are heavy laden, which is an invitation aimed precisely at somebody carrying more than was ever allocated, and the Spirit of God is what makes that call about a route home rather than only about large spiritual matters.

And notice who He says He is, right in the middle of the offer. Meek and lowly in heart. He puts His own character into the sentence before He mentions the yoke at all, because a person will not hand a load to somebody they expect to be graded by.

You have never been in danger of being graded for this, and that is settled by the passage rather than hoped for. Matthew 11 has Him name His own gentleness before He asks anybody to take anything on, and His Spirit is the one who makes that gentleness the atmosphere of a driveway on a Tuesday.