Excerpted and adapted from Unburdened: The Secret to Letting God Carry the Things that Weigh You Down.1
People don’t raze a building on prime real estate in order to leave the lot empty. They don’t erase a whiteboard in order for it to remain clean (or at least they didn’t back when whiteboards were a thing). They don’t declare bankruptcy in order never to buy anything again. Any intentional finish or clean slate is for the purpose of starting something new.
Likewise, in our search for a burden-free life, we don’t lay down our burdens and worries and fears so we can sit on the couch and do nothing (or we shouldn’t). We lay them down so we can do what we were meant to do and live as we were meant to live. we don’t leave our old life behind simply in order to not have it anymore. We do it to enter into new life.
That new life will be filled with a lot of the same circumstances and people we faced in the old one, so we’ll have to ask ourselves, What exactly is new about it? What aspect of our new state is supposed to be more liberating than the way of life we used to know?
There are several answers to these questions, not the least of which is the empowerment we get from the Spirit within us. But one reason the new, unburdened life is so different than the old, heavy-laden life is the different focus we have. Like the man who found a treasure in a field and sold all he had to buy that field,2 we trade in a complicated web of multifaceted focal points for one overriding passion. We shift from people who are focused on relationships and bills and plans and desires and clothes and food and housing and retirement to people who serve Jesus. That simplifies life a lot.
The Streamlined Life
A well-known scene from the movie City Slickers amusingly illustrates this principle. Curly, the salty old rancher who is guiding the three city slickers on a cattle drive, offers to tell Mitch (Billy Crystal) the secret of life. He holds up one finger and says, “One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that, and the rest don’t mean [garbage].” When Mitch presses him to explain what the “one thing” is, Curly smiles and tells him, “That’s what you have to find out.”3
Mitch thinks this cryptic advice is pointing to one big secret that Curly won’t reveal, and when Curly dies soon afterward, Mitch thinks the secret has died with him. But by the end of the movie, he figures it out. Curly never intended to specify what the one thing was; he was simply saying that a single exclusive focus is the key to success. For Curly, it was cattle ranching. That’s all he did, and he did it well. For Mitch and the other two city slickers, it could be anything else. The point was to live life with one priority and not with a scattered, diversified soul.
This movie scene echoes the theme of a 1929 novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, The Magnificent Obsession, in which a surgeon receives a journal from his mentor that explains the secret to success. That secret, the only way to be truly fulfilled, is to quietly and sacrificially serve people in need. Douglas is said to have based his novel on Matthew 6:1-4, a passage in which Jesus urges his disciples to practice their righteousness secretly and not before men. The phrase “magnificent obsession” has been used in evangelical circles since then as a description of exclusive devotion to Jesus.
It’s significant that one of the key verses in a passage about worry — the section in the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus tells his disciples to look to the birds and the flowers as role models4 — offers this viable alternative. Not only are we taught not to focus on food and clothes and the worries of life; we’re told which overarching priority we should focus on: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”5
A Singular Focus
Anyone who has tried to eliminate worry and stress from his or her life by focusing on the worry and stress has fought a futile battle. It isn’t enough to lay all our burdens down. That never works. It’s a right and necessary start, but it isn’t the whole picture.
When we “let go,” we leave a void, and it’s our nature to fill the vacuum with something. We can’t just let go and not grab on to anything; if we did, we would have empty, pointless lives. No, the answer is to replace what we’ve let go of with something else. Jesus tells us what the proper replacement is: a magnificent obsession with the Kingdom of God.
This principle applies to many areas of life, both mundane and spiritually crucial. It’s virtually impossible, for example, to get one persistent tune out of your head without first replacing it with another. It’s hard to get over one lost love without finding a new one. We don’t cease from sin by trying to eliminate it, but by living instead by the Spirit.6
So it only makes sense that we get rid of our burdens not by focusing on them but by finding a much more worthy replacement. This replacement is heavier, in the sense that it’s much more important than anything we’ve clung to before; but it’s also much lighter, in the sense that we aren’t really the ones who have to handle the weight of it. When God’s kingdom — including his presence, his character, and his ways — is our singular obsession, we find supernatural strength supporting us. It’s the “one thing” that truly sets us free.
Chris Tiegreen, Unburdened: The Secret to Letting God Carry the Things that Weigh You Down (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2009), 130-133.
Matthew 13:44.
City Slickers, Columbia Pictures, 1991.
Matthew 6:25–34.
Matthew 6:33, NIV.
Galatians 5:16.