Two monks, who had taken vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, were walking along when they came to a swollen river. On the bank they found a distraught young woman, pulling her hair in anxiety as she fretted because her family, who needed her, was on the other side.
Gauging the level of the water and the swiftness of the current, one monk lifts her up onto his shoulders and carries her through the flood to the other side.
Two hours later, as the monks walk along in silence side by side, the other monk turns to his companion and says, “Brother, how could you break your vows by carrying that woman, by touching her?”
The other replied, “I put her down two hours ago – why are you still carrying her?”
(Told to me in Sri Lanka by Bishop Jebanesan, Bishop of the Jaffna Diocese of the Church of South India).
How often is it that we carry things around with us that we should have put down long ago? Regrets about the past, grudges we have clung to, refusals to forgive, all those “If I had only”s.
Why not just decide, today, right now, to put those unnecessary burdens down, and choose to walk in newness of life in this day, in all its never to be repeated glory?
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