The Cross

A personal prayer ...

Help me, Lord, to love well today - to love you and love my family in a way that is pleasing and acceptable to you.  I know that I live on that precarious line of balance – where there is a temptation to move either into more activity or into a drowsiness.  Help me to steady myself here where I only embrace that which you give me – no more, but no less.

I want to be fully awake today – awake to know your love and to know the heights of love to which you are drawing and calling me!  Draw me after you and let us run together.  I will rejoice in you and be glad!

Keep my mind from worthless things!  I want to know YOU, LORD!

I am so apt to think of me instead – of my discomfort and what I give up.  But in this holy week I reflect on what should truly be on my mind – your sacrifice, Jesus.  You are the one who agonized and sweat drops of blood – because of me and my sin and your desire that I should be reconciled to you.  Oh, how you wanted to avoid the horrifying nature of your death - to the point that you sweat tears of blood and cried out for another way.  We can see that as a human you were fully aware of how much it would hurt, physically and spiritually, to have that sin upon you and have the Father turn his back on you as you breathed your dying breaths, so painfully drawn.  And yet you said, “Yes.  Father, let your will be done and not mine.” 

How absolutely pitiful it is for me to not want to give up even the little comforts and conveniences, to make small sacrifices for more time with you; I am hooked on the habits and desires that fill my spoiled existence.  How can I reconcile a desire to please you and walk in your ways with this life that is so full of me and my ways?!  It is ridiculous.

Yesterday, after a day of focusing a lot on self – just in the regular mundane way of this world – I sat down to read the mail.  And what was there?  Letters, updates.  I read the accounts of those who are suffering for Jesus (CRU and Gospel for Asia) – those going to great lengths of discomfort and pain, even to death threats, to bring the gospel to others.  They have counted the cost and made their choice to follow where few will go, and to keep their faith even when their relatives are so deeply opposed that they are beaten.  

And yet I struggle with such stupid trivial things – like how do I choose to journal and pray while the rest of my family watches a movie?  And how do I respond to one who says, “I can’t enjoy it unless you are there next to me”?  So small a sacrifice for me, really, to just stand up and say, “I choose Christ today.”  While people across the globe must say, “I choose Christ,” in the face of beatings and being disowned (or murdered), am I too weak to say, "I choose Christ," in these very small things?

Oh, me of little faith and small love!  Is there any hope for me? 

Lord, I feel stupid confessing and repenting again.  I feel ashamed and unworthy.  I feel like I will certainly fall again lest your mercy and grace wash over me and change me completely.  I need YOU to be here in me in a new way!

I come to you in weakness and beg of you for strength!  I am simply me – and so weak!

In the other room (in the incubator from science club) a duckling struggles to be free of the shell.  It cheeps pitifully, repeatedly, and thrashes about the Styrofoam brooder amongst the still intact eggs.  Oh, how I would prefer to pull the shell away, set it free from the desperate struggles!  But God reminds me to let it fight for freedom on its own.  With each desperate effort, it grows stronger.  Perhaps this one will be the strongest of the bunch, stronger than those whose struggles lasted minutes rather than hours.

My Father reminds me, “I love thee far too well to leave thee in they self-made hell.” (quote from Hannah Huranards Hinds Feet on High Places).   I must embrace the struggle to be free from this shell, this cocoon of me and the comfort that I crave.  Perhaps my self-made hell is made of this – a demand that things come easily, readily, without struggles.  Could it be that MY road to hell is paved with good intentions -- intentions that are carefully assigned to tomorrow and next year and five years from now? 

This world - my American life -  is a place of distraction and sedation, and admittedly there are times when I crave it more than I crave true Life.  Father, forgive me!  I know that the way of the world is not for me.  I know that you are calling me into a place of engaging fully with you and fully with those you give me to love.  Forgive me, Lord, for my hesitancy to follow.

Father, help me understand that the road of ease and comfort is not mine - nor should I seek it.  When I embrace it, I am embracing a dangerous path.  I cannot afford to compare, to make light of my transgressions by comparing them to other things.  I live here – in the land of opportunity and excess. Here I must live -- on the shores of the River Compromise -- but to dip my toes in that river ... is to invite the spirits of deception to lure me further in.  

No!  I must not be deceived.  I must turn radically, with deliberate intent, toward the cross.  I must cling to the foot of the cross and call out to the only one who can bring true life, lest I be swept away to drift along the river that leads to the slow death of complacency and laziness.

I choose the cross!

Intercession is one cross I bear.  Years ago at a prayer and worship meeting (at C-HOP)  my three year old (my youngest) drew a picture of several crosses with stick figures on them.  They were bleeding.  And when I asked her about the picture, she said, "That is us.  We are praying."  The reality spoke volumes to my heart, and I must remember it now.  We climb up on our crosses to pray.  We are not here as couch potatoes reciting prayers.   We are willingly embracing the suffering of Jesus and the suffering of the lost, broken, and hurting.  This lost art of intercession.  This lost art of compassion - to suffer with, to embrace.

I realize that it is hard to know You, Jesus, on the road that is comfortable and pleasant.  Godliness with contentment is great gain, but contentment without godliness can slip me right into complacency, and comfortable living can slowly slide me down into dullness.  I must resist the dullness by pushing harder into your presence.  I must resist the complacency by pressing on more purposefully to the prize!

I must remember the embrace  -- the embrace of praying for others.  My Lord, you embrace me with your love, so that I can embrace others with your love.  May I crave the embrace not for me alone but for all those whom you will embrace with your love through me – all those for whom I pray.  May I continue to press in for their healing and wholeness, and mine.

I press in for healing and wholeness, not just for me, but for those whom you have given me to pray for.  I embrace them in this time of prayer and I thank you for the miracles that you are doing!

Lord, forgive me for taking this all too lightly.  I want to be one who clings to the cross.