Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Jesus asks His disciples to take up their cross and follow Him. This is a strange invitation. Calling a person to follow by taking up a cross, does not seem like a strong selling point. A cross includes things like hardships, disappointments, sadnesses, heaviness, difficulties, trials, sickness, and rejection, to name a few. These are things that a person tries to avoid.

Taking up a cross as a part of following Jesus seems more a reason to not follow Him. Why follow someone whose invitation includes a cross?

We all know that life has more than its fair share of burdens. Today, Our Lord is teaching us a very important lesson that every human being must learn. By inviting us to take up our own cross, Jesus calls us, in a specific way, to grow in ways that can only happen through the cross. By experiencing hard times and setbacks, a person can experience greater levels of meaning and purpose. The cross, when embraced with faith, can lead a person to holiness and a greater awareness of God. It is often in the struggles that a person hears things that otherwise would not have been heard. C.S. Lewis once wrote that “God whispers to us in our pleasures; God speaks to us in our conscience; but God shouts to us in our pain. Pain is the megaphone that God uses to rouse a deafened world.” Pain can move our heart in ways that few things can.

While it is true that good things can come from experiencing pain, this is definitely not the same as saying pain is good. Sickness, suffering, and death are not good in and of themselves, and we do well to avoid them. But when hardships must be faced, and they cannot be avoided, we are called to take them up as crosses to follow Christ. When we do that, they have the potential to deepen us and to open us to a better life.

Several years ago, I was blessed to speak with a young man dying of cancer, who told me that by God’s grace, he is more alive after the diagnosis than in any other moment of his life. After he made his way through the initial shock, with God’s help, he realized that he was a stronger person than he ever imagined himself to be. I met a young mother who suffered a miscarriage. As she worked through the sorrow, with God’s help, she was motivated to begin a ministry to help other mothers who lose their children in similar circumstances. I’ve spoken with many married couples who, after their first major argument and all the hurt and pain and healing that it involved, could say that with God’s help, their relationship today is deeper and more real than it was before. I met someone who lost a job. He shared with me that it was not until he was unemployed that he began to realize how valuable his family was.

There is something about the struggle that makes us stronger. Biologists have something they call “the adversity principle.” A plant, for example, without any stress, won’t thrive. Instead of growing, the plant will decay and die prematurely. This notion of “no pain, no gain” applies to us as well. If life’s experiences and challenges don’t make you stronger, like the untested plant, you risk growing weaker. Imagine God as the “Divine Diamond Cutter” or “Divine Sculptor”. As an expert diamond cutter works on an unattractive diamond to make it something valuable and beautiful, or a great sculptor chisels away at a piece of marble to produce a masterpiece, so too, God is shaping and forming you into His masterpiece. If the diamond or marble were conscious and able to speak, it would at first howl in agony and protest its treatment—but in the end be amazed and delighted at what it had become. The crosses you carry are for your good even though they don’t feel good in the moment.

God Bless.

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