The Place Where the Weight Is Carried
Last night I was sitting talking with Bianca about something that has been sitting heavily within me.
Yesterday I wrote about memories.
About the strange way we keep returning to certain people, certain conversations, certain seasons of our lives.
About the memories we refuse to lose because somehow they have become part of our survival.
I thought I had finished with the thought.
I hadn't.
Sometimes a thought does not leave when you finish writing about it.
Sometimes it follows you into the evening.
It sits beside you while you talk.
It appears in the silence between sentences.
And sometimes, if you are quiet enough, it takes you somewhere you were not expecting to go.
That happened to me last night.
I was talking with Bianca about my friend, about loss, about the things that remain with us when someone or something has changed and there is no way to go back and make it different.
And somewhere in that conversation, something became painfully clear to me.
I have spent a lot of my life asking what God is doing with suffering.
But perhaps there is another question.
Where does God ask us to put it?
Not explain it.
Not solve it.
Not understand every reason behind it.
Where do we actually put the weight?
And I found myself thinking about the cross.
Not the cross as a symbol hanging on a wall.
Not the cross as a theological doctrine we can explain correctly.
Not the cross as an argument we use when somebody asks why God allows suffering.
The actual cross.
The Son of God hanging beneath the weight of human sin, human violence, human rejection, human grief, human betrayal.
And suddenly something inside me shifted.
Perhaps the cross is not merely where God explains suffering.
Perhaps the cross is where God carries it.
That distinction matters to me more than I can explain.
Because there are wounds in life that do not become easier simply because someone gives you a good explanation for them.
There are losses that cannot be reasoned away.
There are phone calls you never wanted to receive.
There are hospital rooms you never wanted to enter.
There are conversations you wish had gone differently.
There are people you love who suffer.
There are prayers that seem to disappear into silence.
There are moments when faith does not remove the weight.
You simply discover that you cannot carry it alone.
And perhaps that is where the cross becomes more than an answer.
It becomes somewhere to stand.
I think Christians sometimes feel an enormous pressure to explain God.
We want to defend Him.
We want to make sense of Him.
We want to demonstrate that everything that happens must somehow fit neatly into a system we can understand.
We reach for explanations because uncertainty is uncomfortable.
I understand that.
I have done it myself.
There is something inside us that wants to close the circle.
If God is good, then this happened because...
If God is sovereign, then that happened because...
If God loves us, then surely this must eventually make sense...
Sometimes those statements are true.
Sometimes they contain genuine theological comfort.
But there are moments when they can become too small for the grief sitting in front of us.
There are moments when the most faithful thing we can say is simply:
I don't know.
And then remain beneath the cross.
That does not mean abandoning theology.
It means recognising that theology was never meant to become a substitute for God Himself.
The cross does not give me every answer I want.
It gives me Christ.
And perhaps that is more important.
Because when I look at the crucified Christ, I do not see a God standing at a safe distance from human suffering explaining why it exists.
I see God entering it.
Fully.
Completely.
Without keeping Himself protected from the worst of what humanity can do.
Jesus did not observe suffering from heaven.
He entered our world.
He became flesh.
He knew exhaustion.
He knew betrayal.
He knew rejection.
He knew loneliness.
He knew what it was to be misunderstood by people who were supposed to understand Him.
He knew what it was to watch someone die.
He knew what it was to be abandoned.
And then He went to the cross.
Jesus was fully God and fully man.
There is something almost unbearable about that when you really stop and look at it.
The cross tells me that God does not merely know about human pain.
He has carried it.
That changes the way I think about my own wounds.
I have spent years believing that if I could understand something, I could somehow put it down.
If I could understand why it happened.
If I could understand what God was doing.
If I could understand what I was supposed to learn.
If I could find the lesson hidden somewhere inside the pain.
But perhaps some things are not meant to be immediately explained.
Perhaps some things are meant to be carried into the presence of Christ.
There is a difference.
One demands an answer.
The other requires trust.
And I think I am learning that trust is sometimes much harder.
Because if I understand something, I can feel like I have regained control.
If I know why, I can organise the pain.
I can put it somewhere.
I can name it.
I can create a framework around it.
But the cross takes that control away.
It asks me to bring the wound without pretending I understand it.
It asks me to bring the grief without rushing it.
It asks me to bring the question without demanding that God answer it on my timetable.
It asks me to remain.
That word has been sitting with me.
Remain.
Not solve.
Not explain.
Remain.
Remain beneath the cross.
There are days when life feels almost ordinary.
Coffee.
Work.
Messages.
Shopping.
Traffic.
Dinner.
Laundry.
Bills.
A conversation with someone you love.
A completely normal Tuesday.
And then there are moments that split life open.
A diagnosis.
A death.
A betrayal.
A relapse.
A phone call.
A memory.
A sentence somebody says that you were not prepared to hear.
The strange thing is that both can happen within the same twenty-four hours.
You can laugh in the morning and cry in the afternoon.
You can go to work while carrying something enormous inside you.
You can worship God and still feel broken.
You can pray with faith and still have questions.
You can believe God is good and still say, "God, I don't understand this."
I am increasingly convinced that genuine Christian faith has room for that tension.
Perhaps more room than we give it.
Because the cross itself contains a tension we cannot resolve.
Glory and suffering.
Victory and apparent defeat.
The King crowned with thorns.
The One through whom all things were created hanging from wood.
The One who gives life experiencing death.
And somehow, in the mystery of God, the place that looked most like defeat became the place where redemption was accomplished.
That makes me wonder how often I have mistaken the appearance of something for its final meaning.
How often have I looked at a painful chapter and assumed that because I could not see redemption yet, redemption was not happening.
How often have I looked at silence and assumed God was absent.
How often have I looked at weakness and assumed God was doing nothing.
The cross confronts that thinking.
Because on Friday, if you had stood there without knowing Sunday was coming, it would have been almost impossible to believe that anything good was happening.
And yet God was accomplishing something enormous in the middle of what looked like absolute catastrophe.
That does not mean every tragedy is secretly good.
I think we have to be careful there.
Some things are genuinely terrible.
Some things should never have happened.
Some things leave scars.
Christian hope does not require us to call evil good.
The cross never does that.
The cross calls evil what it is.
Violence.
Injustice.
Betrayal.
Sin.
Death.
And then God does something that only God can do.
He enters the middle of it and brings redemption through it.
That is very different from saying the suffering itself was good.
I think that distinction matters.
Because sometimes Christian language can become cruel without meaning to.
Someone loses someone they love and we immediately tell them that God has a plan.
Someone is suffering and we tell them everything happens for a reason.
Someone is grieving and we rush to the lesson.
Someone is devastated and we give them a verse before we give them our presence.
Maybe sometimes the most Christlike thing we can do is simply sit beside someone in their pain.
Job's friends understood this for a moment.
They sat with him.
They were silent.
And then they started talking.
Perhaps they should have stayed quiet a little longer.
I say that gently because I know how easy it is to do the same thing.
We want to fix suffering because somebody else's suffering reminds us that we are vulnerable too.
So we explain.
We theologise.
We rationalise.
We try to make the unbearable feel manageable.
But Jesus did not come to make human suffering intellectually manageable.
He came to save.
And He saved us through a cross.
That means Christianity does not begin by pretending suffering is understandable.
It begins by proclaiming Christ crucified.
That is the centre.
Not my ability to explain God.
Not my ability to predict what He will do.
Not my ability to understand why one person is healed and another is not.
Christ.
Crucified.
And somehow, strangely, that gives me permission to hold two things at once.
I can believe God is sovereign.
And I can still cry.
I can believe God heals.
And I can still grieve someone who was not healed.
I can believe in miracles.
And I can still accept that I do not control when they happen.
I can pray boldly.
And I can surrender completely.
I can expect God to move.
And I can trust Him when He seems silent.
I don't think those things cancel each other out.
Perhaps they are supposed to live together.
There is something in me that still believes God can interrupt the ordinary.
I still believe He answers prayers.
I still believe He heals.
I still believe the Holy Spirit moves.
I still believe there are moments when heaven touches earth in ways we cannot explain.
I don't want to lose that expectation.
But I also don't want my expectation of the miraculous to become a rejection of the God who meets us in the ordinary.
Because some of the deepest encounters with God in my life have not happened on mountaintops.
They happened in hospital rooms.
In quiet mornings.
In conversations.
In tears.
In waiting.
In moments when nothing spectacular happened at all.
The cross has taught me that God can be present in places that do not look victorious.
That matters.
Because most of life does not look like victory.
Most of life is ordinary.
We wake up.
We work.
We cook.
We clean.
We answer messages.
We worry.
We laugh.
We get tired.
We pray.
We forget to pray.
We remember.
We begin again.
Wash rinse and repeat,
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, Christ remains.
The cross does not disappear because the day becomes ordinary.
Perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things about it.
The same Christ who carried the weight of the world's sin also meets me in the small weight of an ordinary day.
And then, without warning, the extreme arrives again.
A friend is hurting.
Someone dies.
A relationship changes.
A memory resurfaces.
Something we thought we had finally put down suddenly becomes heavy again.
And we discover that the cross has not moved.
That has become precious to me.
The cross is still there.
When my emotions change.
When my faith feels strong.
When my faith feels weak.
When I understand.
When I don't.
When I am full of hope.
When I am exhausted.
When I am asking God for a miracle.
When all I can manage is, "Jesus, please help me."
The cross remains.
There is something profoundly stabilising about that.
Because I change constantly.
My emotions change.
My circumstances change.
My understanding changes.
My confidence changes.
I still wrestle with Sin.
But Christ crucified does not change.
He remains.
And perhaps that is what I needed to understand after yesterday.
The deepest wounds I carry do not need to be made small before I bring them to God.
I do not need to clean them up.
I do not need to make them spiritually impressive.
I do not need to turn them into a testimony before I am allowed to grieve them.
I can bring the wound while it is still a wound.
I can bring the memory while it still hurts.
I can bring the unanswered question.
I can bring the anger.
I can bring the confusion.
I can bring the love.
I can bring the person I miss.
I can bring the version of myself I still mourn.
I can bring all of it.
And I can place it beneath the cross.
Not because I understand what God will do with it.
Because I trust the One who is already there.
That may be a deeper kind of faith than the faith I once thought I needed.
When I was younger, I thought faith meant certainty.
Now I think faith can sometimes look like staying.
Staying when you cannot explain.
Staying when the prayer has not been answered.
Staying when the tears come.
Staying when the questions remain.
Staying when you have no eloquent words left.
Just staying.
There is something profoundly biblical about that kind of faith.
The Psalms are full of people who believed in God while asking Him where He was.
The prophets cried.
David cried.
Jeremiah cried.
Job questioned.
The disciples doubted.
Peter failed.
And Jesus Himself, hanging upon the cross, cried out in anguish.
"Why have you forsaken me?"
I do not think we should rush past that sentence.
God Himself entered the language of human abandonment.
Jesus did not pretend the cross did not hurt.
He did not stand above human anguish and give a lecture about sovereignty.
He entered the anguish.
He carried it.
He experienced it.
And then He entrusted Himself to the Father.
That is the mystery I keep coming back to.
The cross does not remove the reality of suffering.
It tells us that suffering does not get the final word.
Death does not get the final word.
Sin does not get the final word.
Betrayal does not get the final word.
The worst thing that humanity could do to Christ did not become the end of Christ.
And perhaps that gives me courage for the wounds I still carry.
Not because I know exactly how every story will end.
I don't.
There are things I still don't understand.
There are people I still miss.
There are prayers I still carry.
There are chapters in my life where closure was non existent.
There are wounds that have become part of my history.
But I know where I can take them.
I can take them to Jesus.
And maybe that is enough for today.
Not an explanation.
A person.
Not a theory.
A Saviour.
Not a promise that everything will immediately make sense.
A promise that I will not carry it alone.
When Bianca and I were talking last night, I realised something I had not fully understood before.
Perhaps the deepest wounds of the human heart do not need a better explanation.
They need somewhere safe to go.
And there is nowhere safer than the feet of Christ.
So this morning I am thinking about the cross differently.
Not simply as the place where my sins were forgiven.
Though it is that.
Not simply as the centre of my theology.
Though it is that.
Not simply as the evidence that God loves me.
Though it is infinitely that.
I am beginning to see the cross as the place where I can finally stop pretending that I am strong enough to carry everything myself.
The place where the weight can actually be carried.
The place where grief can exist without destroying hope.
Where questions can exist without destroying faith.
Where tears can exist beside worship.
Where expectation can exist beside surrender.
Where the ordinary and the extreme can arrive in the same day and neither one can move Christ from the centre.
I don't need to understand every road God takes me down.
I don't need to know why every door closes.
I don't need to know why some prayers are answered immediately and others seem to wait for years.
I don't need to turn every wound into a lesson before I am allowed to call it painful.
I need Christ.
And perhaps that is what the cross has been saying all along.
Come here.
Bring it here.
The things you cannot explain.
The things you cannot fix.
The people you cannot save.
The memories you cannot erase.
The grief you cannot hurry.
The questions you cannot answer.
The weight you cannot carry.
Bring it here.
Not because I will explain everything.
But because I will carry you while you carry it.
And maybe that is the revelation I needed.
The deepest wounds of the human heart are not too deep for Christ.
The grief is not too complicated.
The history is not too long.
The memory is not too painful.
The failure is not too shameful.
The question is not too difficult.
The wound is not too old.
The sorrow is not too great.
There is room beneath the cross.
Room for all of it.
And today, I think I finally understand something I have spent years trying to learn.
I do not have to carry the weight just because I cannot explain it.
Christ has already carried what I could never carry.
And He is still carrying me.
That is where I want to remain.
Beneath the cross.
Not with every answer.
Not with every wound healed.
Not with every prayer resolved.
But with Christ.
And for today,
Christ is enough.
About the Author
Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 6.1 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.
- Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
- Explore the Journey: Follow Dylan on Google Maps
- Connect on Instagram: @porkysparadise
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