When I had my appendix out, the doctor's instructions included a ban on lifting. Ten pounds was the maximum, and considering the mutually affectionate relationship with my toddler at the time, it seemed unlikely that I would comply. I still managed to heal from the incision. 

My current capacity for heavy lifting is nothing to brag about. Not like my kids who go to the gym to hoist a hundred and eighty pounds into the air. Then they come back the next week and do it again. 

But there are other burdens that I wrangle with. Resentment can compress my shoulders as deeply as any yoke. The other day I was weighed down with a scenario I had fabricated myself. The absence of any effort to assume good will cleared the way for blame. I honestly wonder if my bathroom scale would have registered additional pounds. 

I watched a video called Rediscovering Forgiveness. Part of the dialogue was about Eva Kor, a woman who was tortured at Auschwitz. The crimes done against her by the Nazis lasted for years, but the blistering anger that followed in their wake endured for decades. Although Eva had been liberated from the camp, she was as much of a prisoner to fury. 

But in time she was able to cast that mountain of revenge into the sea. Eva forgave the perpetrators. It seems incredulous. Even more so than the promise Jesus made in Galilee. 

 So Jesus answered and said to them, “Assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but also if you say to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ it will be done." Matthew 21

Yet the liberation Eva spoke of after her experience with compassion made an even bigger splash than Pike's Peak would incur crashing into the Colorado River.