The Burdens We Don't Break

There are burdens that we walk through, that we carry, that journey with us through different stages of life.

And oftentimes, those burdens were passed down to us. We inherited them. Some we picked up along the way simply because life happened. Mistakes were made. Things were done.

There are some things we hated. We hated them so much that we said we would never become those things.

But eventually, we became them.

Because we had never seen them broken before. We had never seen anyone go through the difficulty of actually walking and working through them and breaking them.

There are old patterns.

They are just patterns.

No one taught us how to walk through them. We never saw anyone work through them.

And sometimes, it is not even always the negative things.

Maybe no one built a company from the ground up. No one stood tall in their field. No exceptionality, just casuals and averages, nothing deep.

No entrepreneur was really built. No one in ministry eventually broke even and did something extraordinary for God.

It could be anything.

We just never saw a model. We never saw it happen.

And because of that, we lived very common lives.

We grew up with a lot of ambition and said, “You know what? I am going to be the best that I can be. I am going to break this. I am going to break that.”

Then life happens.

Then marriage happens.

Then one child.

Then another.

Then all the successes, responsibilities and progress of life start to happen to us.

And then what happens?

We forget.

Or maybe we didn't forget. We just journeyed through life.

It wasn't such a big deal anymore.

Now there are so many more important things. So many more tasking things.

And you start thinking, I will not be the Messiah. I will not be the saviour. I will not be the one who goes looking for all the things that have been buried, working so hard to uncover all the things that should be uncovered.

And then we just journey.

And if you're so lucky and you enter parenthood, if you're not careful, that is the mountain you're going to be on top of until the very time when you no longer have the strength to pull down barriers anymore.

And then you just want to live through it and tell tales and tell stories of how you survived.

When we talk about barriers, most people think we're talking about some terrible yoke.

But I'm talking about little, simple patterns.

I'm not talking about simply being able to go through university.

I'm talking about being able to break even. Being able to go beyond what ten or fifteen other people in your generation have done.

And sometimes, the reason we struggle to do that is simply because we never saw breaking through modelled to us.

But then that was all. No one got through beyond that.

What we call success is what we have capped success to be.

But what about going beyond that?

Who modelled that?

How are you going to make the generations coming behind you a little bit better?

Are you just going to tiptoe through life and aim to be slightly beyond your last forefather?

Or are you going to run out of it and say:

“You know what? Let this be a starting point for those coming behind me.”