Crossing

What seems so harsh and gloomy, the present reality of death and dying is nothing of the sort.  We have in death the perfect picture of how life gets out of the ditch.  When once we see, perhaps for the first time, that this daily circle will one day veer off to the left and go somewhere else, somewhere completely different, we finally grasp the reality of things.  It is always lurking back there in our minds...the death and dying, but we hardly can face it for ourselves.  God's call from death is a shriek of icy water splashed on us without warning.  This will not continue and you must stop thinking it will.  Every dying man hid from it as you have for the longest time.  Old photographs of relatives long gone are not mere curiosities, they are the perfect text of your own place in God's world.  The Lord wants you to die and you must die.  The cross of Christ will be carried by you and in the end it will kill you.   Does this perturb you?  Are you irritated by it?  Do you welcome it?  The woman in India cannot really see things as the woman in Ecuador;  they are worlds apart and you won't really see things as God does until you take up your cross and carry it fully to its stopping point.  God wants you dead and you will be.  Right now you struggle mightily with the cross and groan under its weight thinking somehow you can cast it off or crawl out from under it but it is yours and you must carry it if you are to come after Jesus.  Scream and cry and fight against it if you think you must but it is better to courageously  face squarely the inevitable than kick away at the goads as it were like the Apostle Paul while he was still Saul.  Die, let Christ kill you off completely.  Resurrection is just as inevitable as the Cross but you cannot reach the former without going through the later.  Give Christ His way with you and He will raise you up and the sin in you will finally be dead.  Remember though that the cross is the cross of Christ given you by Him and not  yours to choose.   Never try to pick your cross...It would be like letting the monkey take the controls of the plane just as it is set to land.    The mercy of God was not in living but in dying and unless the seed is buried...it does not spring to life.

 Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.  For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.     Luke 9:23-24 NIV