Bearing One Another’s Burdens

Faithful Love Along the Long Road

Bearing One Another’s Burdens: Faithful Love Along the Long Road is a pastoral, lived-faith reflection on what it truly means to love one another over time—through grief, aging, illness, friendship, prison walls, and the ordinary demands of daily faithfulness.

Drawing from Scripture, decades of ministry, personal loss, and prison and hospice chaplaincy, Geoffrey Schmitt explores the biblical call of Galatians 6:2 with honesty and discernment. This book carefully distinguishes bearing burdens together from unhealthy co-dependency, showing how love can be both generous and wise, present without control, faithful without exhaustion.

Each chapter examines a facet of shared life: grief that lingers longer than expected, the humility of receiving help, friendships that endure distance and time, the Church as a community of shared responsibility, prison ministry as holy ground, and the difficult truth that some burdens belong to Christ alone. Along the way, the reader is invited into stories of real people and real places—prisons, nursing homes, sanctuaries, and quiet moments on the road—where love is practiced not in theory, but in patience.

Structured for both personal reflection and group study, the book includes Scripture, teaching, meditation, reflection, poetry, discussion questions, a prayer, and “The Smithy’s Forge” in each chapter. It is written not to fix suffering, but to accompany it—to remind readers that no burden borne in love is wasted, and no road is walked alone.

This is a book for those who are weary, those who care for others, those learning to receive help, and those who are still walking—faithfully—along the long road.