How do I tell her the older you get the harder it gets? How do I tell her I'm sorry for all those years it was about bunnies and eggs more than Christ and His cross?
How do I tell her the weight of the cross gets more crushing every year if you just let it? And that we should just let it. Just let the cross crush us under its weight of pain and agony and sin and hell and love? Let it crush us until we cannot breathe and must surrender and die and drink of the blood and eat of His body just to live. And not just eternally - but here, too.
And our world doesn't do this. Our world rejects the cross. Over and over and over ...
This child of mine that I love. How do I tell her? This child whose happiness I would die for - that happiness is not what she was made for? That once the stone was cast and the garden was no longer ours, happiness was no longer our purpose?
And today we may seek it in bunnies and eggs and clothes and tomorrow maybe in homes and cars and jobs but always when we die to the cross we see. We know. That all that stuff is like climbing a ladder whose rungs never reach the top of anything.
And we can climb and climb until the air is thin -and then breathing is hard baby. Cause guess what? We don't belong up there. Climbing higher and higher.
We belong low. At the ground. At the foot of the cross. At the feet of Jesus.
She tries to gently ease us into the taste of bitter herbs.
And she cried. Sitting there surrounded by this meal she prepared.
She cries for the man who called saying he had nothing left to live for. No family. No one to love. No one to love him. And I look at her. And she's right back in the same place she's found herself in for years. Lost in Jesus. And not sure what to do with it.
She thinks I don't know that she's still searching for her purpose. That when she thinks, often, that she has it all figured out she's jolted into the reality of the cross. Reality of a dying world around her searching for life in air too thin to breathe.
How do I tell her she's supposed to feel like this? She was born to feel like this. To miss this feeling is to be dead.
Cry for this world.
Look to Christ.
Dwell on the cross.
