'HE'S MY BROTHER'

“HE AIN’T HEAVY FATHER…HE’S MY BROTHER”
    
This beautiful saying has become synonymous with helping each other out as we journey together in life until called back to our Creator.  It has always meant a lot to me and I pray it does for you too. Its origins date back to 1918, a year after Father Flanagan began “Boys Town”, a home for unwanted or abandoned youth. That same year Father Flanagan had just taken in Howard Loomis an abandoned polio-stricken boy who was being carried on his back, by another young boy as they went up some stairs. Father Flanagan asked one of the older boys who would carry Howard, if carrying him was hard. The older boy responded with those words, “He ain’t heavy Father..he’s my brother.” A photo of this same older boy carrying Howard earlier in the year at a picnic, became the story line and the visual (statue of one boy carrying another) for Father Flanagan’s “Boys Town.”

It was 1969, fifty- one years later that Bobby Russell a song-writer wrote a beautiful song, while battling cancer, that was performed and became a big hit for the singing group the “Hollies, and it was titled, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” This beautiful song as performed by the Hollies, now became synonymous with charity, with helping on another. If you know the song you already know how it draws you in, and if you have never heard it, then it is time to look it up, and listen. It very much reminds me of the poem “Footprints,” where when we are having a hard time in life and we think that we are walking alone because we only see one set of footprints, that is when we find out that in those time Jesus was carrying us. This is what society needs today, we need to see that Jesus walks with us in every aspect of our lives and carries us when needed. “I am with you until the end of time.”

Here are just a few of the lines of that song, “So on we go/His welfare is of my concern/No burden is he to bear/We’ll get there. If I’m laden at all/I’m laden with sadness/That everyone’s heart/Isn’t filled with gladness of love for one another.
 
But I’m strong/strong enough to carry him. HE AIN’T HEAVY, HE’S MY BROTHER