I met 91 year old Mariska at church. A one room building, no bathroom, a wood burning stove in the middle. The kind of benches that don’t allow for an ounce of comfort. The stage was decorated by a red fabric-covered lectern, thinning green carpet, and an electric organ straight out of the sixties. The wall behind it was covered in a mural of Creation that must have been painted around the same time Velvet Elvis photos were popular.
Mariska sat next to me, took my seat actually, because I was the closest to the door, and her old bones didn’t seem to have another inch in them to make it to next row. During service she cried. I could never know for sure what about, but I got the sense that she knew her life was near ending. At the end of service I prayed for her, and as the teams stood up to leave, she gripped my hand firmer and firmer, with a strength I could never imagine coming from such a frail woman. The Spirit put it on my heart to walk her home, and so she gripped my arm and we took the walk. She welcomed us (a couple teammates joined me, we never do anything alone) in, opening the gate while shooing away chickens. Her modest two bedroom home was overrun with chickens and cats. Their feces smelled up the house, and covered the floor. Newspaper was neatly cut in patterns covering the shelves to mock a lace draping over them. Mariska spoke to us as if we knew her language, she sang hymns for us, and sent us home with cookies. When I left she kissed our foreheads and teared.
I returned again today to her home to help her with the gardening- more like farming, because on such a limited budget, she often ate what she grew. It’s hard to imagine a 91 year old taking care of the land alone. The field in the back of her yard was just downwind from the hole in the ground known as her outhouse. Our job was to overturn the land, till it, to prepare it for seeding. I spent the day digging my shovel into the earth, picking up what I had and turning it over in front of me. The recent rains made the mud easy to cut through, but it also meant that the mud would stick to the shovel. Mariska insisted on coming over to me every few minutes and scraping off the mud that had collected.
That mud is a lot like the troubles and responsibilities we carry around, Mariska taught me without words.
Galations 6:2-5 reads: Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one examine his own work, and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. For each one shall bear his own load.
The land tilling is my load: my job, my responsibility. It’s the day to day things that we should be able to handle ourselves. I was able to turn over load after load.
Yet the burdens, the things that stick and never go away, the extra heavy loads, we are made to get help with. We are not made for carrying them alone. I tried to do it myself and somehow, the burdens stayed with me. The mud would stick to my shovel little by little as I dug, and I would use my foot to push it off, and yet the mud would stick to my boot, so I would continue to carry it just in a different way. Like repositioning a trouble. I needed Mariska to work her magic to finally be able to let go of my burden.
We are each given different loads and burdens. This is the way we are able to help each other. In today's case, Mariska's burden was simply a load for my able body. But my burden was a task that Mariska had many years of experience with, she knew how to handle it, and therefore help me get rid of my burden, because to her it was simply a load.
