06/03/2026
I was thinking the other day about how easy it is to carry things we were never meant to keep.
A harsh word from years ago. A betrayal. A disappointment. A rejection that cut deeper than anyone realised. It’s almost as though every painful thing that happens leaves a stone on the path in front of us. And because we’re human, because we’re trying to survive, we bend down, pick it up, slip it into our pocket, and keep walking.
The trouble is that life keeps happening. More hurts. More disappointments. More fears. More reasons to question ourselves. More stones.
Before long our pockets are full, and we’ve carried the weight for so long that we don’t even realise how heavy we’ve become. We just know we’re tired. We know we’re anxious. We know we overthink. We know we expect rejection before it arrives and disappointment before it happens. We think that’s just who we are, when perhaps it’s simply the weight of everything we’ve been carrying.
Then I started thinking about the verse that tells us to cast our cares upon Him because He cares for us. Cast. Not carry. Not keep tucked away in our pockets for the next ten or twenty years. Not pull out every now and then to examine before putting them safely back again. Cast.
And I couldn’t help but picture myself standing beside a lake,reaching into my pockets and throwing those stones as far as I could. The stone of rejection. The stone of shame. The stone of regret. The stone of that thing somebody said years ago that somehow still has power over me. One by one, watching them disappear beneath the surface.
Because here’s the thing. Those stones cannot change the past. They cannot rewrite what happened. They cannot undo the hurt. The most they can do now is haunt us and try to steal our future. They steal joy from today, courage from tomorrow, and confidence from opportunities we haven’t even stepped into yet.
Maybe that’s why some of us feel so exhausted… Not because we’re weak, but because we’re carrying things Jesus already invited us to throw.
So here’s your reminder today. Drop the stones. The shame. The regret. The labels. The old wounds. The hurts that keep whispering they deserve a permanent place in your pocket.
They don’t.
- Little Sparrow Loved
littlesparrowloved.substack.com