”Take up your cross and follow me.”
Mark 8.34
To take up the cross
is the greatest paradox:
to enter the world’s suffering
for the sake of healing;
to endure injustice
for the sake of justice;
to abandon my safety,
secure in grace alone;
to bear the pain of oppression,
neither wilting nor retaliating;
to desire fullness of life
enough to suffer for it;
to steward my gifts and powers
at one with all who suffer;
to resist the culture of death
even if it kills me;
to entrust myself to grace,
releasing all attachment to outcomes;
to bear goodness into the breach and know
that life will be borne beyond me;
to have given my life over entirely
to the Spirit of Life
and found there, in life given, not clutched,
love’s surprising joy.
By this grace, having died and been raised,
I am ready to take up the cross.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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