When Jesus says, “My yoke is easy and My burden is light,” I take this to refer to it being and exact fit for each of us–that He is making it possible for us to become our real and true selves. When I evade the mark toward which I am aimed, my ‘vocation’–and this includes my cross in life which is Passion-bearing with Christ–I am inevitably, as Jonah discovered, swallowed by the unconscious manifestation of that which I have avoided. Passion-evading leads to being overcome by what I have rejected, now in the form of a passion that has assumed the proportion of the great Leviathan which takes possession of me fueled by the power of the very untransformed energies that would otherwise have become part of my authentic aliveness in Christ.
By virtue of avoiding my cross, I forfeit the freedom to become myself. I miss the mark. My yoke does not ‘fit’.
As the Lord said to Saul when he was avoiding his own passion-bearing through presumptuous self-righteousness and the idolatry of religious ideology, “It hurts to kick against the goads.” I remain captive in the belly of the whale, as it were, until I am spit out, and hit bottom like the Prodigal in the pig sty where I am offered a chance to ‘come to my senses’, turn again, and set off in the direction of my Father’s house, carrying my cross and beginning to recover from the wounds inflicted by my avoidance.
~Rev. Dn. Stephen Muse (When Hearts Become Flame pp. 66-67)
Prayerful Life 