What It Costs

"Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." (Galatians 6:2)

Loving people is harder than any of us expected. Say that plainly rather than dress it up, because too many people have left the work of love without ever being told the truth about what it costs, and then blamed themselves for the wounds. Ministry wounds us in places we did not know we could be wounded. Compassion costs more than we knew when we started. That is not a complaint and not a warning to stay away; it is simply the truth of the trade, and the people who last are the ones who were told the truth early.

Some are only a few years into loving somebody hard, and the early fire has already gone out, and the wounds have begun to stack, and they are quietly wondering whether they can do this for a lifetime, whether they can sustain a thing already almost too heavy. Others have been at it for decades and are looking back and asking a different question, whether it mattered at all, whether they spent themselves for nothing.

Both questions are honest, and neither has a clean answer, because clean answers may not exist for this. But here is what can be said without lying. The cost is not a sign that you took a wrong turn. It is the shape of love in a broken world, and the ones who quit are almost always the ones who thought the cost meant they were doing it wrong. You were not doing it wrong. You were doing it. Do not leave.