Check Your Baggage

Flight travel since 911 remains an unnerving experience, but most of us realize that flying is still safer than driving on most US interstates. Unfortunately, security regulations continue to be a challenge. Most travelers today are opting for avoiding the hassles that come with checking in baggage, by bringing one piece of carry on luggage. It’s amazing to see just how much stuff can be crammed into some of these bags. Often, travelers ignore the security guidelines and items are rejected. Occasionally, when this happens the traveler becomes enraged and stomps away vowing never to fly on that airline again.

When I witness this absurd human behavior, I’m quick to judge thinking, “I would never do that.” Perhaps not, but as Christian’s, aren’t many of us carrying around similar types of emotional baggage? The emotional gear we lug around and stubbornly we refuse to surrender, can be as small as a pin but more often feels like a huge weight. For some, the baggage could be anger over a spouse that has let us down or walked away. Many of us carry around ugly words that were spoken over us by others. We have accepted these lies as truth and have been deceived. Still others cling to guilt wishing they had confronted a situation differently. The truth is everyone makes good and bad decisions based upon their current circumstances, and information made available to them at the time. We each bear our part of the responsibility but all of us can forgive and receive forgiveness. Sadly, the largest weight most of us carry is un-forgiveness for ourselves.

This emotional baggage is harmful. Too many of us in the body of Christ, have developed herniated discs and a curvatures of the spine from carrying emotional loads we were never intended to bear. How sad this is when each of us can easily check in our baggage with Christ. He is the concierge perfectly equipped to handle our baggage for the remainder of this journey called life.

Occasionally, emotional baggage can be acquired subtly or dumped on you all at once. All of us have been there. Someone is talking and before we realize what’s happened the words have slipped out of their mouths, “I don’t mean to gossip, but..” Gossip, whether we offer or receive it always leaves us with that pit in your stomach. If we receive it, we know it’s wrong and that we should say something but so often we don’t.

My wife and I fell into that situation the other day when we were having lunch at I-Hop. I spotted a guy about twenty years older than me that I hadn’t seen in quite some time. He was sitting alone, so I asked if he wanted to join us for lunch. This man had an amazing testimony. When I met him almost twenty years ago, at a Men’s retreat, he had just become a Christian and had been healed of a terminal disease.

After Don joined our table, my wife and I listened as he reported a few incidents from the past concerning his daughter and a school principal. Over lunch this man continued to dominate the conversation always ending his accounts with a question, in a sense beckoning you to agree with him. Before we had realized what was happening an hour had passed and we had allowed ourselves to be bombarded with a truckload of garbage we had not asked to hear.

This was an elderly man and we wanted to be respectful. He had a great testimony of how Christ had transformed his life and he was actively doing the work of the ministry. Unfortunately, all the good works he was doing were being canceled out by his bad reports. I should have said something but quite honestly was at a loss for words. After twenty years of being saved and working for Christ, he still did not recognize the great load he was carrying and trying to spread to others.
As we paid the bill and prepared to leave, I couldn’t help but consider the forty long years the Israelites spent in the wilderness, all because they wouldn’t stop grumbling and complaining. Their actual journey could have been accomplished in just seven days, but their stubborn resistance kept them wondering for forty unnecessary years.

Sadly, I know I have been in the same place of judgment that Don was in. Words can slip out of our mouths so easily. Thankfully and only by the grace of God, has He helped me gain more and more victory over this same challenge in my life. What bothers me most, I suppose, is that a lot of people like Don don’t even seem to feel convicted about gossip or slander. In 2 Corinthians 12:20, Paul links gossip with quarreling, jealousy, angry outbursts, division, arrogance and disorder. Gossip and slander can start out as a simple word or two, but are only the tip of the iceberg. The caldron that is simmering below the surface is daunting and usually overlooked.

It’s also interesting to me that Paul linked gossip to idleness in 1Timothy 5:13. During those times when we are just sitting around with others and don’t know what to say, gossip can creep in. How easy it becomes to judge, or put someone down when there is no plan or agenda. It’s those times of “Hanging Out,” that open the door for rumor and slander. Instead of using our words to carp, condemn, or pass judgment on others why can’t we use our words for their intended purpose of affirming and accepting others?

Standing at the ticket counter now and watching my bags being loaded onto the rack for transport, causes me to know that whatever is in those bags won’t be needed until I arrive at my destination. From a spiritual standpoint, all of the baggage from this life that we release to God can be checked until this life is over. Once we have checked it, there is no need to keep looking over our shoulder or try to pick it back up. Blaise Pascal probably said it best, “All the troubles of life come upon us because we refuse to sit quietly for a while each day in our rooms.” It’s in this quiet time of sitting with God each day or several times a day that we can make the exchange of our sin and issues, for his forgiveness, healing, and strength.

Checking our emotional baggage in with Christ and leaving it there ultimately takes courage. A dear Pastor that has now since gone home to be with the Lord once gave us the answer to possessing courage. Pastor Paul Palser said that, “Courage comes by knowing three things; who you are in God, that you are where God placed you, and that you are doing what God wants you to do.”

Check your baggage and keep moving forward!