JEFF TURNER

The longer you walk through the tunnel, the heavier the weight becomes, not lighter. Suffering does not diminish simply because you have endured it faithfully. It compounds. It settles into the bones. And this is precisely why the fellowship of believers is not a luxury but a necessity. We are called to carry one another’s burdens when the load grows too heavy for one set of shoulders.

All of us face trials. This is not the experience of the spiritually weak or the theologically deficient. It is the common inheritance of every soul who draws breath in a broken world. And because all of us face them, all of us need the discerning spirit that can look across the room at a brother or sister and perceive that something has shifted, that the weight has quietly grown heavier than it appears.

Where the love of God is genuinely at work, that discernment is not merely a social grace. It is a gift of the Spirit, and it carries with it a solemn responsibility to move toward the one who is sinking rather than past them.

 Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ.

Galatians 6:2