Yoke

How many times have I heard the scripture:  "Come unto  me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  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."?  About a thousand.

I have to say I got something new today--not from anything anybody said, just personally in my own head.  I think I always pictured the Savior being the one with this big, heavy,  I have to say, awful thing strapped onto him--Him with all the burden, asking me to join him in the yoke and trying to convince me that it would make my life easier--like the commandments.  They seem restrictive and heavy, but they actually ease the burdens of life.  I never saw it as me with the load, even though that's exactly what it says.  How could I see it as my load when he was weighed down with that once already?  Should he really have to help me pull it now, when he already pulled it for me by himself once?

Taking on Christ's name (yoke) isn't an easy thing though.  There's a lot of responsibility that goes with giving him my cares.  There's humility and trust, not to mention all the time and hard work involved with trying to be enough like him to even keep up when he starts pulling. 


I drive a widow in our ward to church every week.  She was telling me a story this morning which I was thinking about the whole time we were discussing yokes and loads.  She said when her daughters were in young women's many years ago, they fund raised all year and took a trip to Hawaii.  She said how great it was and how much the girls loved it and what a treasured memory it was.  Then she told how they raised the money.  They had 5 girls whose fathers worked for an airline, so they could fly free.  She then said that those girls still  had to raise the same amount of money, thereby spreading the load evenly and lessening it for the ones that didn't have an advantage.  It was a simple, practical example for my literal mind--much closer to my realm of thinking than oxen.