Too often we chafe under our crosses--we want to change them, to make them more conformable to ourselves and to the image of ourselves that we would like to reify. But it is a serious mistake to try to our crosses to fit our warped and distorted figures. Rather, we should change ourselves to fit the cross God has given us. We are strange, misshapen creatures, warped and distorted. The crosses we bear are to shape us to our place of service in the body of Christ.--when we resist them and seek to change them we are, in essence, saying that our appointed place is not to our liking.
We can think of our crosses as orthopedic devices. We may think that we're amblilng along just fine, but in truth we lurch forward in fits and starts, and stumble and fall on a regular basis. The cross is a set of braces, it supports us, shapes us, and allows us to walk upright--not to halt and to lurch. As with the application of any braces there is some pain--sometimes there is considrable pain. But the end result is that we are better able to walk or move, or chew.
As we become conformed to the cross of the day we take on the image of Him who bore our sins on the Cross of Eternity. We bear His Holy Image to all who look upon us on our own crosses. And we achieve a wholeness that cannot be won outside of our battle to conform to the crosses God has given us. As Mr. Gibson showed us memorably in the film, we must not merely endure the cross, we must accept it, embrace it, and make it our own. This is God's shaping of us--sometimes painful, but always with an eye to the eternal destiny that has been wrought for each of us in Him.
