Come to me all you who are burdened…

and my burden light.”

The company, U-Haul, has been along — has been around since 1945, believe it or not. So since 1945, we have been able to haul everything that we want by ourselves. It really is a great idea, you know, because back in the day you used to have to rent a truck and rent a driver as well and rent movers, and now you can save money and do it yourself.

We’ve kind of gotten this whole concept down of U-Haul. The idea is we can haul out anything — and for those of you that know me, I have a truck, and I love having a truck because I have a truck bed, I have a trailer hitch from U-Haul, actually, and I can haul just about anything I want to. I can throw it in the back, and I can take care of it. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s a blessing, but it’s also a curse. So every blessing is said to come with a curse.

The curse of U-Haul is, guess what? We haul everything. And sometimes that can get kind of burdensome. And I think that’s part of our mentality is we have this notion or this idea that we have to carry everything ourselves. U-Haul.

So I put a thing on Facebook, and I just wanted to see what are some of the burdens that people carry. I wanted to find out what are the burdens that we all carry. And one of the things that actually came up pretty early on in the post was a little thing called this. One of our greatest burdens that we have now is the cell phone. Why? Because we are always connected. We can get our e-mail on this, we can get our work on this. It’s never away from us.

And then if cell phones are not enough, we have laptops. So in my black backpack we have a laptop. We carry our laptops around and we can do work now outside of the office. We can even get work done on the weekends. We can get work down late at night. We can continue to do that.

When we don’t have our laptops, what else do we have? Our iPads, right? So now we have our iPads, and we can use these all the time to even work late at night, like even if we’re sleeping in our bed, you know. If you can’t sit up and type, now we’ve got a laptop and I can work on that.

Let me have my backpack.

So these are some of the things that we carry around with us. You know, I have continued to ask other people what were some of the things that they carried, and I found that one of the heavy burdens was medicine. You know, so people, I think especially as you age, begin to have to take more and more medicine. How about that little bag there. So you got like this medicine bag. And it starts off with, like, one little bottle, right, and then the next thing you know you are taking another little bottle, and then the next thing you know you are taking a bigger bottle. And before you know it, you’ve got like one of those old people cases, those pill cases where you put all of your pills for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, all the days of the week. So that’s like a burden that we carry.

One of the things that — how about the binder under that box there. Sometimes people, even in summer, have to take class work or summer school or, you know, continue to study for their work. So this is a binder I have, and this is spiritual reading I do even during the summer. So that becomes sometimes a burden.
How about that box now. The biggest burden I have is my files. So if you’ve ever been in my office, it is horrible. There’s bills, there’s marriage files, there’s annulment files, there’s paperwork all over. Another burden that we have are our files and our folders and our bills and all of the paperwork that we have to do to keep up with.

How about that, like, grocery bag? There’s like a freezer bag. That definitely is not it. It’s the red bag on the bottom there. So then you got a grocery shop. And sometimes that can be a burden, the grocery shopping. It’s the red bag on the right, all the way over.

They don’t know what a grocery bag is. Don’t you make these kids shop Reicherts?
So this is one of those freezer bags that you carry around with you. Maybe you are burdened by the shopping and the chores and the work that you have to do.

And it’s summertime. The landscaping has to be done, the yard work and the grass has to be cut. That could be a burden. So what do we try to do in the summer? We try to take a vacations, right? So we try to take a break. So vacations are a big break.

How about my swimming trunks in the bag over there. So swimming trunks, bag. Thank you.
So then we go on vacation, right? And you go on vacation and you’ve got to pack all your stuff. You get your stuff packed up. You come back from vacation and you think you’re all rested up, and then you need a vacation from vacation. Right? And then you come back and you got all of your office work and your work to do.

And summertime is a great time for sports, too, right? So there’s all these sports going on with the kids, especially baseball. So the kids are all playing baseball and they have got their games now and their tournaments.

I have a good friend who went to his grandson’s game, and he’s in seventh grade. The game had a few rain delays, so they didn’t start until 9:30, and the game ended at midnight. Now, this was a Tuesday night, and the father had to work at five o’clock the next morning. So even sports can be a burden. So how about my gym bag. So even out sporting activities, things that are supposed to be fun in the summertime, those kind of become a burden, and we carry that burden.

Before you know it, things start to get really heavy, and so we try to find other things to do to unburden ourselves. And one of the things I know that guys do a lot, and ladies during the summer, is golfing. So we try to get on the golf course. Can I have my golf bag? Now, golfing I find to be more of a burden than a joy. I love to be out in nature, but I spend more time looking for my balls than I do anything else. So then we got our golf bag. We got to try to make time for golfing. And that’s another burden that we carry.

Now, I normally — one of the perks of being a priest is I have someone that does my laundry for me and cooks for me sometimes, but when I take my days off for vacation, guess who has to do the laundry? I do. So how about the laundry. That’s actually dirty sheets. Stack it up there. Thank you. So we have the burden of laundry.

We have all of these burdens that we carry around. You know, it’s the whole idea of U-Haul. You can haul it all. You can do it all, right? And we have this whole mentality that we need to carry everything. And when we do that all by yourselves, U-Haul, we become terribly burdened, and the load is heavy. It is really heavy. And we become exhausted.

Then we hear in the gospel message “Come to me all you who labor and are burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart and you will find rest for yourselves.”

So are any of you burdened now this summer? What I invite you to do is, instead of having the mentality of U-Haul, I want you to change that mentality and change it to God-Haul. Because the idea is we’re not supposed to carry everything by ourselves. When we try to, when we try to be U-Hauls, we end up getting burdened and exhausted. And the Lord knows that we do this. So what does he invite us to do? He says, “Come to me.” That’s what I invite you to do. Whatever your burdens are right now, whatever you’re carrying, whatever heavy load you may be burdened by, come to the Lord and he will give you rest. It no longer has to be U-Haul. It’s supposed to be God-Haul.