Boundaries & repair
Boulders and Backpacks
There is a particular phone call, and I have come to think of it as the most tender act of harm in the English language.
It is the call to a pastor, a school, a landlord, an employer, occasionally an attorney. It is made in a voice full of real love. And its purpose is to arrange for something not to happen to someone.
The person making it is not corrupt. Very often they have prayed about it first. And what they are doing, in that moment, is intercepting the only teacher their adult child was going to have that year.
Four things that look identical from outside
Most arguments about helping go wrong because one word is doing four jobs.
- Provision is meeting a need someone genuinely cannot meet. A person in a wheelchair does not need to learn to use stairs. A grieving widow does not need to learn to cook this month. Nothing here is an argument against provision; Christians should do more of it, not less.
- Support is helping someone carry what they are carrying. It leaves the load with them and adds strength. Sitting with someone while they make the hard call is support. Making the call for them is not.
- Interference is removing a consequence that had a job to do. It looks like the first two and is doing something else entirely.
- Absorption is interference that has become structural — one person or system has taken permanent ownership of the costs another person generates.
Almost nobody moves straight to absorption. Families arrive there through a series of individually defensible decisions, each made under time pressure, each about a specific emergency, none of them ever reviewed as a pattern. That is the honest thing to say about it: nobody chooses this system. It accretes.
The two verses that look like a contradiction
Three verses apart, Paul writes two things that generations of readers have found frustrating:
Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2)
For each one should carry their own load. (Galatians 6:5)
In English it reads as though he forgot what he said. In Greek it is not a contradiction at all, because they are two different words.
Baros, in verse 2, is a crushing weight — the thing that is too heavy, the thing that will break a person left alone underneath it.
Phortion, in verse 5, is the ordinary pack. A traveler’s kit. A soldier’s standard load. The thing a person is supposed to carry, sized to be carried.
We carry each other’s boulders. Each of us carries our own backpack.
And the context sharpens it further: in verse 5 Paul is talking about examining your own work rather than measuring yourself against someone else. The load in question is a person’s own responsibility before God. Taking it is not generosity. It is a kind of theft, and what it steals is whatever carrying it would have produced.
The question that replaces “should I help?”
The practical question is never should I help. It is: is this a boulder or a backpack?
Job loss is a boulder. Chronic illness is a boulder. Grief is a boulder. A house fire is a boulder. Get under those without measuring, and do not make the person prove they deserve it.
The consequences of a person’s own repeated choices are, almost always, a backpack.
The test is not about the size of the trouble or how much distress is in the room. Both boulders and backpacks generate distress; that is not the variable. The variable is where the weight came from, and whether carrying it is the thing that would teach.
Why the honest answer is uncomfortable
Because the same act — the transfer, the phone call, the co-signed lease — can be any of the four, and only the person doing it knows which. From outside, a boulder lifted and a backpack stolen look exactly alike.
Which is why the useful discipline is not a rule but a question asked out loud, before the money moves:
Whose weight is this, and what does carrying it teach?
And if the honest answer is that it is theirs, one more question, which is harder: what am I actually preventing — their difficulty, or my discomfort at watching it?
Try this
List the last five times you helped someone in your family. Beside each one write B or P: boulder or backpack.
Do not judge the Ps. Just count them, and notice whether any of them repeat. A backpack you have lifted three times is not a series of emergencies; it is an arrangement.
The short version
- Provision, support, interference and absorption look identical from outside and do completely different things.
- Baros is a crushing weight; phortion is the ordinary pack. Paul is not contradicting himself.
- Carry each other’s boulders. Let each person carry their own backpack.
- Job loss, illness, grief, disaster: boulders. The results of one’s own repeated choices: almost always a backpack.
- Taking someone’s backpack is not generosity — it steals what carrying it would have built.
Where this comes from
Chapter 3 of Protected From Reality works this out at length, including the four things that actually drive the rescuing. The free companion workbook has the boulders-and-backpacks sort as its second exercise. Read about the book.