As pressures mount and the load feels too heavy to carry, we need a place to unload the weights that our fragile vessels cannot bear. Which direction do you look to when feeling heavy with an emotional weight that’s too painful to carry? What and where do you find your escape and solace? Generally, we look to something or someone tangible and we take action toward who or whatever this may be. It may be a relationship, TV, Smartphone, sex, compulsive eating, or drinking alcohol.

Sometimes blaming and yelling at a person, with all your emotional pain, releases pressure from yourself onto this other fragile, imperfect soul. Riots result from masses of people who carry built up, pent up emotional pain. A single event can trigger the unleashing of massive, multifaceted frustrations in destructive ways. Sometimes our work or exercise becomes an escape, and we spend excessive amounts of time in these areas of our lives. Recently, through a dream, the Holy Spirit revealed another way we find escape. In the dream a military man had just returned from the battlefront of war. Overwhelmed with weighty emotions, he went into a bar and found another person who was experiencing deep emotional pain and hopelessness. Drinking his beer, with laughter and lightheartedness, he declared to his newfound “friend”, “let’s just drown in our sorrows together!” This man found comfort in companionship with someone else who felt his own feelings of emotional pain and hopelessness. But unfortunately taking comfort by sharing in negative emotions is merely temporary, fleeting and never life-giving.

Beloved, Jesus is a man who knew the depth of human sorrows. His desire is for the heavy-laden soul to find true companionship in Himself who has experienced the depth of emotional and physical pain. The difference between Him and others who sympathize with our pain is that He overcame such deep sorrow. In love He carries sorrow to the grave, destroying its power against us. He says, “Know that I have shared in your pain and sorrows. Taste of My victory over all these sorrows. Take from My heavenly Spirit of joy unlimited, for I have overcome your sorrows. Find true companionship in Me, this is why I came. I came to experience, carry and defeat the weight of sin and darkness. Let Me carry you out and into the light.”

Beloved, turn away from your default actions and seeking solace from the natural world. Run to find healing comfort through companionship with the Man of sorrows. Seek Him who loves you deeply and has your way out of sorrow into everlasting joy.