cross – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

The left footprint on display in the fresh-turned soil bore no resemblance to its counterpart. My right foot featured a really high arch while the left one lacked an arch at all. This one’s imprint carried the appearance of a flat board.

Thus, my bare feet had left a trail of odd alternating marks as I leapt to keep pace with my daddy’s longer strides across the plowed furrows.

Yes, the hardship of poliomyelitis from a prior time had left permanent marks. Yet, here I was curiously limping. . . and frolicking.

We don’t find people who are prone to relish suffering. I would certainly not be counted among them. Words like hardship or adversity or pain stir in many of us a cringe of resistance and angst.

Still, visiting the Bible’s pages we routinely find triumph mingled with trial. Pleasure and pain show up as near neighbors. Happiness keeping company with hardship.

We muse over these strangely-matched companions. Especially so in reflective seasons like Holy Week, the period of Jesus’ (and history’s) darkest hours leading to his awful crucifixion.

How perplexing seems the phrase of the New Testament writer, “looking to Jesus who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross*

Enduring flogging and a torturous public execution with its attending shame, Christ’s suffering comes to us as ‘hardship’ utterly redefined.

So, we revisit our prayer – “accepting hardship as a pathway to peace”.

The apprentice of Jesus comes to actually affirm the beauty of suffering when endured in a grace lavishly supplied. Holding the master’s image in view the disciple settles into an element of peace words fail to capture. The difference is found through the example and presence of the resurrected, sacrificial coach.

Christ’s disciples make up that unusual sampling of humans who reconcile the paradox – hardship, an indispensable part of the good life.

He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace*

The prophet’s words broke over him like a great wave deluging a child at play on a calm beach – sudden and unforeseen. Overwhelming. One moment all is serene. . . all is chaos the next.

Tears surfaced from a bottled place deep within Leonard, like a long-capped reservoir straining for release. The emotion driving the tears was anguish – an all-encompassing sorrow like he had never known. Soul anguish.

The fourteen words he just read had wrecked him. The first line looped repeatedly in his mind.

“The heart is deceitful above all things” The statement – bold as it came – stripped him entirely. Between sobs he wondered, How could the mere reading of words impact me so? The puzzlement came jumbled, not tidily delivered – more a crying than a question. He felt the worst kind of pain, the pain of detecting his own dreadfulness, the deception of his own heart. Shame.

Leonard realized that for too long he had been self-deceived. He took in the remaining words. . .

“. . and desperately wicked: who can know it?” The anguish remained, coming even stronger now and in waves.

“Deceitful and wicked.” His sense of guilt brought him to the floor. Sobbing, he lay face down, prostrate. A crushing sense of unworthiness drove him further. Moving the throw rug aside he stretched himself directly to the floor. The next day came and went. When not at work or trying to sleep nights he lay at his place on the floor. He knew his misery had a name. Sin.

Years later he recounted the scene in his memoir Impossibilities Become Challenges.

“I saw myself as I had never seen myself before. Lost, undone, wicked. .It seemed as if my very clothes smelt of the awfulness of sin.” In his drive to critically dismantle the book, the book was dismantling him. In a single verse the Bible exposed him, shining its light on his own pride.

Entering his third day of misery, Leonard thought to exit his room, find a place in the back yard and go prostrate there on the bare earth. It was then something happened.

“Something arrested and stilled my mind.”

Leonard found himself looking at a cross. “It possibly was a vision”.

Affixed to the cross by sharp iron nails was a heavily bleeding man.

“I seemed to understand this blood was for my sins.” He knew the man to be Jesus. “He was saying to me, ‘I died in this way for you. I shed my blood for your sins. Just accept my work of redemption.’”

Tag: cross

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