Yoke.

Today at chapel we learned about Matthew 11:28-30:

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, 

and I will give you rest. 

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, 

for I am gentle and humble in heart,

and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

I grew up in the church so I was familiar with this verse and have heard it talk about often. Yet somehow until today I had missed the real meaning of the verse. 

Here is what I thought about it up until today. I will come to God and he will fit me with a yoke which I will somehow be able to pull despite how heavy it is... and in that I will find rest. It didn't really make sense to me that I would be bearing this burden alone, but I would be happy about it. In my mind it work out because God knows me well enough to know my strength so instead of me starting off pulling 200 pounds, He would start me with 20 and work my way up.

Now, none of that is technically wrong, I was just missing a huge piece of the puzzle. 

This was simply because I had never seen what a yoke looked like. 

So look for yourself and see what I was missing:

A yoke is meant to be used by a pair.

When God invites me to come to Him and take His yoke upon me, He is asking me to come alongside Him.

The creator of the universe, the man who knows the grains of sands that line the beaches and the blades of grass that cover our fields, it beckoning me to come alongside Him.

This thought makes my heart swell. 

He wants to share my burdens. To pull them with me.

A life in Christ isn't about taking on the impossible alone in order to glorify God.

It is about doing the impossible with Him because then the glory does not come in the completion of the task alone, but also in the process of completing it. 

The glory comes in the sharing of the burden. In the learning for the One who knows all. 

Now, that picture of a yoke is beautiful.