The Weight That Disappeared

In 2014, a structural engineer named David Chen noticed a hairline crack in a pedestrian bridge he had approved in downtown Portland. It was small — probably nothing. But instead of reporting it, he stayed quiet, afraid the oversight would cost him his career.

For eighteen months, David drove past that bridge every morning. He lost twenty pounds. His wife thought he was ill. He stopped sleeping through the night, jolting awake at 2 a.m. imagining the worst. "My body was eating itself alive," he later told a reporter. The secret sat on his chest like a slab of concrete he could never set down.

When he finally walked into his supervisor's office and laid it all out, the response stunned him. The crack was cosmetic — a surface imperfection that posed no structural risk. The bridge was sound. His supervisor thanked him for his honesty and sent him home early. David sat in his car in the parking lot and wept for thirty minutes.

This is the landscape of Psalm 32. David the king knew exactly what David the engineer discovered — that unconfessed sin doesn't just wound the soul; it wastes the bones, dries up the strength, makes summer feel like drought. But the moment we stop hiding and bring our burden into the open before the Almighty, something miraculous happens. The weight disappears. Not because the sin was never real, but because God's forgiveness is more real still. "Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven," the psalm begins — and that blessedness isn't just spiritual relief. It is the whole body exhaling at last.