How Full is Your backpack?

Up In The Air: Trailer Backpack @ Yahoo! Video


How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people.

Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.

Great speech, even better movie. George Clooney is an amazing actor but this is still the human response to carrying weight. We try and carry everything, we try and balance what is and what is not important. We try and do all the work ourselves only to discover we are not strong enough, we are not tough enough, WE JUST CAN'T DO IT.

Instead of turning it over to Jesus, we first try and shed weight, Remove friends, end relationships, distance ourselves, lessen our workloads and for a minute, for a moment, even for a month, IT WORKS. It seems to get better and lighter but this is still not the way God intended it. This proves itself by the weight coming back, getting heavier again and that feeling of this is too much to bear returns. SO WHAT DO WE DO?

GIVE YOUR BACKPACK TO GOD! Quit trying to find the right weight ratio of friends, relationships, burdens, bills, the formula never works out. Quit living life as a hermit, scared to let people in because they weigh too much or it costs too much. Give your backpack to Jesus.


Matthew 11:28-30 (Common English Bible)

28 “Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest. 29 Put on my yoke, and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest for yourselves. 30 My yoke is easy to bear, and my burden is light.”

Owens