Not Mine to Carry

You can find out what is happening almost anywhere on earth the second that it happens. A war starting, an election, an earthquake, a stranger's opinion about something you had never once thought about five minutes ago. It all arrives on the same small screen, all day long, every single day.

Some of it genuinely matters. Wars move economies and elections have consequences, and things that happen far away really do reach us eventually. Pretending otherwise would be silly.

But what about the sheer volume of it? How much of what you learned yesterday was actually yours to do something about? Most of it is noise, information about situations we cannot affect, handed to people who were never built to carry any of it. Then we hit the end of the day tired and irritated and we cannot always say why.

We have built a world that hands us access to everything. Somewhere along the way we decided that access meant obligation.

Three thousand years before any of this existed, a man wrote three short verses that cut right through it. His name was David, a shepherd who became king of ancient Israel and wrote a large chunk of the book of Psalms. Here is the whole thing. (Read Psalm 131 for yourself.)

LORD, my heart is not proud; my eyes are not haughty. I do not get involved with things too great or too wondrous for me. Instead, I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like a weaned child. Israel, put your hope in the LORD, both now and forever. (Psalm 131:1-3, CSB)

Two things are worth knowing before we dig into it. This was a song that pilgrims sang while they walked uphill toward Jerusalem, so it was basically travel music. And David was not a man with a quiet life. He spent years being hunted by the king who came before him, and he waited a very long time for a throne he had already been promised. He wrote plenty of other psalms that are not calm at all.

So when this guy tells us his soul is quiet, he is not saying it from a hammock.

Above His Pay Grade

LORD, my heart is not proud; my eyes are not haughty. I do not get involved with things too great or too wondrous for me. (Psalm 131:1, CSB)

Notice that he starts with the heart and only then moves out to the eyes. Inside first, and then what he goes looking at. Is that order an accident? Pride does not usually start with what we say out loud. It starts with what we quietly think we are owed.

Then comes the practical half of the verse, where he admits that some things are simply above his pay grade and he is fine with that.

Read that part carefully, because it is easy to hear the wrong thing in it. He is not saying that he is too dumb to understand, and he is not saying that curiosity is bad or that we should stay uninformed on purpose. He is saying that some things are not his to hold. There is a real difference between a question being hard and a job not being yours.

So what are our versions of it? Being informed about everything, having an opinion ready for everything, being current and seen and in the know. Needing to know how something turns out before we are able to rest.

Most of us did not pick those up because we are arrogant. We picked them up because we assumed that we were supposed to. Did anyone ever actually hand us that job, or did we quietly apply for it ourselves?

Weaned, Not Starved

Instead, I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like a weaned child. (Psalm 131:2, CSB)

Everything in this psalm hangs on one word, and it is a word most of us do not use much anymore. Weaning is simply the process of a child moving off of milk and onto regular food. At the very start, milk is all that a baby can handle, and the child depends completely on somebody else for every bit of it. A nursing baby does not politely request milk. It demands it, loudly, at three in the morning.

Here is what matters for the rest of us. Have you ever been around a child going through this? Weaning is not tidy. There is a stretch where the child protests and fusses and wants the old way back, because the new way feels like loss even while it is actually growth. Nobody gets weaned quietly.

But then it is finished, and the child is not worse off for it. Not punished, not starving, just sitting at the table eating what everybody else is eating. Still with mom, still held, and no longer grabbing.

That is the picture David reaches for, and notice which child he picks. Not a nursing one. A weaned one, past the fussing and past the protest, settled.

I got a small picture of this at HomeGymCon this past week, and the whole thing was a little surreal. I kept walking past people I felt like I already knew, guys whose channels I have watched for years, and I caught myself wanting to go say hello like we were old friends catching up. Then it lands on you. They have never met me. I know their garage and their opinions on rubber flooring, and they do not know my name. That is not a friendship, it is a feed, and I had somehow been treating one like the other.

I got a small picture of this at a home gym convention this past week. I walked the floor for hours and talked with vendor after vendor, and I went home with a grand total of two business cards. Hardly anybody hands those out anymore. What they want instead is the follow, so almost every one of them gave me their social media info and asked for mine. Every time, I told them that I do not do social media.

And every time, I braced for the eye roll. I figured they were about to look at me like a guy who still prints out his driving directions.

So what actually happened? What I got instead was envy. One after another, these people told me some version of I wish that I could do that. These are folks whose whole income depends on reach and platform, and half of them wanted to put it down.

Sit with that one for a second. Not one of them was impressed and not one of them was mocking. They just wanted something they had already decided they were not allowed to have.

Now, this is not a post about social media. Some of you have never had an account in your life and are feeling pretty good about yourselves right now, and I would hate to let you off that easy. So fill in your own blank instead. What is the thing that you assume you cannot live without? Maybe it is the news cycle, or the phone, or the running commentary in your head about people who are not even in the room. Maybe it is needing to know how a thing ends before you can rest in it.

Everybody has a milk they are still grabbing for, and mine is not going to be yours.

Then He Turns and Says It to Everybody

Israel, put your hope in the LORD, both now and forever. (Psalm 131:3, CSB)

Did you catch the pronouns? The first two verses are entirely I and my, so it is his heart and his eyes and his soul. Then in the very last line he turns around and speaks to an entire nation.

He does not close with and that is how I found my peace. He closes by handing it to somebody else.

So what is all that quiet actually for? A settled soul is not a retirement plan that we save up for ourselves. It is something we end up spending on other people.

Notice where the hope goes, too. Not into a strategy, not into a timeline, and not into finally having everything figured out. He tells them to put their hope in the LORD, both now and forever. He is not promising that the situation resolves. He is pointing past the situation.

That is worth saying plainly, because this psalm gets misread as a nice trick for relaxing. Is that what David is selling here? The calm in these verses comes from trusting a specific God who is actually there, not from lowering our expectations until nothing is able to disappoint us. Those two things can look similar from the outside, but they are not the same thing at all.

Maybe you have been trusting God for forty years. Maybe you are reading this genuinely unsure whether any of it is true. Either way the invitation in these three verses is the same, and it starts smaller than you would expect.

Name one thing you are carrying that was never actually yours, whether that is information, image, an outcome, or somebody else's timeline. Set it down this week, not permanently, just as practice. It will feel like loss before it starts to feel like rest, and that is exactly what David is describing.

Can you sit at the table without the milk? What would your week honestly feel like if you did?

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Scripture quotations marked CSB have been taken from the Christian Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible® and CSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.