CROSS ON, CROSS OFF

And he was saying to them all, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me”. ~ Luke 9:23

I’ll be honest – I still stumble over the cross. Not the Jesus bore the penalty for my sins part – that part, I adore though I still struggle to get a grasp on what it exactly means. Not the I’ve been reconciled with God, I’ve been redeemed, I’ve been bought with a price, I’ve been sealed by the blood of the Lamb – all of that abides smoothly like a balm on my soul. It’s that take up your cross and follow me part. That’s the stick that trips me – because that part is really hard. That part sucks rocks.

I can’t nail down what it means.

It’s what causes me to ask myself sometimes, Are you really sure that you’re even a Christian?

How can you call yourself a follower of Christ, if you actually don’t really want to follow him? Maybe ten steps behind waving palm branches, waiting for your portion of bread and fish, thirsty for water, hungry for righteousness – but carrying a cross? I don’t know. It’s not a parade – it’s not shiny jewelry on a chain around your neck. It is one slow, inglorious death march Jesus is asking us to take. Don’t carry a cross and expect not to be crucified on it.

So you have to ask yourself – Do I really believe that? Do I really believe that’s the way? Is this really what I want to teach my children?

It kind of came down to it this week – the rubber met the road and left a skid mark. I halted. I dropped my cross cold onto the ground, set my shoulders back straight and said, Seriously? Wtf. No.

Because it happened to my child. That’s how it is with convictions – they are stone solid, until it’s your child.

My child made a mistake. It wasn’t a big mistake – it was the kind of mistake a hundred other children could easily make in a day laughing, without conscience, without fear of reprisal. It was a mistake made in secret – nobody ever would have known. But she knew. And because she has a conscience that is tender, a heart that hungers for righteous and a stomach that spits sin out of it before it ever gets sour, she confessed it to me.

And because I never want her sin to go ingrown, into secret places, into hard to sweep spots, I took her by the hand and I said, This is the way. I said, The truth will only set you free. I said, You are so brave and I just love your heart and I am so very proud of you. I said, God will honour you for telling the truth.

But it didn’t really work out that way. The confession cost her. It cost her big.

Her mistake was not forgiven – in fact, it was held up and used against her. Not only that, but that little mistake drew old buried under the blood sins from years past to it like a magnet – things long ago repented of were pulled out and held against her. And a Jesus-loving adult pulled out an indelible marker and drew lines around her, and wrote words over her – all her sins. They called her a name.

And her tender conscience, her beautiful heart, her personal integrity, her unbelievable courage, her strength of character, her simple honesty, and her obedience to what’s right even when she’s done wrong – all of that was ignored, like it didn’t happen. Like she’d never been the one to confess it first, to shed tears over it, to seek to set it right.

And my soul felt Judas – like I had betrayed her with a kiss.

I thought long and hard about stones. I thought long and hard about picking one up and throwing it right back. I had a stack of them, equally sized, equally weighted.

But a Voice said, An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

I thought, It was such a stupid little mistake. What did I have to go and make it a big deal for? Why couldn’t I have taught her how to sweep under the rug? Nobody would ever have known.

But a Voice said, My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.

I thought, She did what was right, even though it was hard. Why, God, have you forsaken her?

But a Voice said, They do not know what they are doing.

And a Voice said, Forgive.

That cross is so hard – because it just is not fair. It is so unfair, it’s offensive.

My daughter got her first hard lesson in the painful part of the Gospel – that Truth does not spare you the cross. She paid the price for her sin old school. She got shunned, old school.

I am still going to teach my children the way. I am still going to teach them that God sees the heart, but that the only name He ever writes onto us is Mine.

But I’m not going to lie – the temptation is there. The next time somebody comes at my child with a log sticking out of their eye, I might decide to go old school. I might decide to think Yael. I might decide to think tent peg.