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More Reflections on Embracing the Cross

More Reflections on Embracing the Cross

Last updated on: January 20, 2025 at 10:22 pm by Sherry Antonetti

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More Reflections on Embracing the Cross 2025-01-20T22:22:54-05:00 Sherry Antonetti

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If you follow Christ, you will suffer, but you will suffer joyfully. Not happily mind you, but with a full heart, knowing that your pains, your tears, your agonies, your injuries, your fears, all of it, is united in Christ on the way to, or on the cross.

Image by Philip Walenga from Pixabay
You will know rejection, whether before you are born, or on route to the place of your birth, or after your birth, as a babe, as a child, and as an adult.

You will know betrayal, by those who claim to love you, and by those who profess to believe what you believe.

You will know the scourging of insults, cruelty, and malice.

You will see whole crowds turn against you.

You will know the agony of the garden, anticipating what is to come, praying to be able to weather it, and you will be put on trial, both for what you have said, and what has been said about you.
Image by Hans from Pixabay
You will be crowned with thorns, thoughts that stab the mind and refuse to let go or give you peace.

You will know the weakness of souls that run, souls that remain silent, and souls that allow themselves to be moved by the crowd. You will know the hurt of weak wills, who profess one thing, but live out another.

You will know the heaviness of sin and the crushing weight of hardened hearts.

The nails of the world will pierce your hands and your feet and your heart, and you will feel yourself poured out, wrung to the last drop, knowing you can give no more.

All of this, whether or not you suffer physical martyrdom for the faith, you will endure. If you would embrace Christ, embrace the cross. If you would follow Him, the cup of which He drinks, you will too.

What’s more, you’ll still have to love them. All those people that disappoint, that injure you or those you love? Everyone that makes you angry, that somehow makes the hardness of now worse, by their words, deeds, said and unsaid, done and left undone, or done poorly, you have to still love them, and somehow, pray for their salvation and work towards it too by your life. It’s an insane kind of love, infinite love, that makes no sense to a finite and sinful world or to any of us absent grace. And yet, it is all true, and all worth it.

Absent the promise of this gift, none of this would be worth any of our effort.

Life involves suffering, struggling, and surrender. It’s only bearable through love. The crucified Christ is the tangible physical reality of God’s promise of love beyond suffering, stronger than death, stronger than sin, greater than all the evil the devil can devise, or that humanity in its most brokenness, is willing to mete out.

We proclaim Christ is Lord because He willingly endured our worst, that He might say to us from the cross, even this, even this, “Father forgive.” To understand the depth of God’s love, we must begin at the crucifixion –it is the only way to begin to contemplate the infinite nature of God’s generosity to each soul, to every soul He’s ever created. He offers us His son, arms outstretched, that we might know we are each of us, all of us, wanted and welcomed, embraced if we but seek Him. He offers an infinity of love in return for our finite offering of now.
Image by NoName_13 from Pixabay
The cost of hate is an eternity. Eternity is also what love purchases for us if we receive what God offers.

I wrote this because we are entering into a time of great distrust and unrest and worry, and because a woman in a group I belong to, cried out, “Where was God?” because she and her family suffered. And we have to remember always, God is in the boat with us in all of our pains.

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