Matthew 26:36-38 (NIV) 36 Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” 37 He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. 38 Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”
I’m convinced that the sorrows Jesus experienced didn’t end when he died on the cross anymore than his love ended. And to love is to suffer. Everyday, Jesus feels afresh the loneliness, the brokenness, the heartaches and fears, that each person around you is experiencing. He deeply suffers — beyond all words to describe — the broken-heartedness that plagues each heart that knows there is something profoundly disordered within them, something they yearn and hunger and thirst for but don’t know why it’s there or where to turn.
He sees them try and try again to fill their emptiness with life’s pleasures and pursuits only to see their happiness quickly fade and that haunting hollowness return.
As Jesus walks through the day he feels all this and in his intense love and compassion he tirelessly works to bring them to the place when they will see in him the answer to all their emptiness and sadness.
And when it comes to the specific people in your life he also yearns for you to walk with him, share his pain, and be his visible presence among them. In so doing you share his burden even if only a small portion. It is not small to him anymore than the comfort you feel is small when you realize that a person who’s with you in some sorrow understands something of what you’re going through.
So each day you can walk with Jesus among your family, friends, and acquaintances and be to him that comforting friend who’s willing to feel something of what he feels and yet be his ray of light or seed of hope in each of their lives.
The question is, will you do that — walk with him? stay with him at his side come what may? Or when some distraction once again makes its appeal to you, will you excuse yourself and turn back and leave him to go on his way alone?
