Life can get us down. That’s no surprise to anyone. If you’re breathing, you’re facing adversity today. Maybe not physically all the time, but spiritually, battles wage. Sometimes we wonder why we feel the way we do – like we’re drifting from God even though we’re still in fellowship with Him. May I suggest that one reason is…Gunnysacking. Got a grudge? We put it in the sack. Jealousy? We put it in the sack. Comparing yourself in a way that devalues how God made you? We put it in the sack. Pain and doubt? Into the sack it goes. The sack, over time, gets heavier and heavier. As humans, we tend to gunnysack our hurt feelings… our destructive thoughts or actions… our negative emotions. Not only that, we sling the sack full of those feelings, thoughts, actions, and emotions over our backs, so that we can’t see the sack, but we sure do feel it. We tell ourselves, “I’ll just put that away for another day,” or “it doesn’t really matter, it won’t affect me,” or… my personal confession, “I don’t want to bother anyone with this.”In doing so, the weight can be so enormous that it’s a depressing drudgery to carry around every single day. Stop. Drop the sack. Breathe. Allow God to enter your thoughts, relax your heart. Take the time to deal with the contents of the sack with the Lord. One at a time, hand Him the rocks of regret, the boulders of blame, the anvils of addiction, the stones of shame. Talk to Him about it. Be in community with other brothers and sisters. Over time, that gunnysack will lighten and the joy of the Lord will refresh anew. Give the sack to God. But, if in the future you start packing in the pounds, creating the pressure once more, take the time again to sit at the feet of the Lord and rest and pray to Him. He is our Heavenly Father, after all. Who better to talk to than the One who created us? Matthew 11:28-30. 1 Peter 5:6-7. Psalm 23. Psalm 51:1-12. Psalm 38:4. Psalm 55:22. 1 John 5:1-5.

©️Rachel D. Lyne