Which Cross
Is Yours?Is Yours?

Part One

The Trade

Would you really swap it for someone else's?

My wife Raine and I take a bath together almost every night. It is our sanctuary, the one place where every mask is off, where we sit face to face with nothing hidden and say the truest, hardest things out loud. And it is where Raine asked me the question this whole reading is built around.

We had been talking that night about how far we had both come and how much it had cost, crying about the things we had lived through and laughing on the other side of them, the way you can only do once the lesson has finally landed. And in the middle of it, she asked me something I have not stopped thinking about since.

"If you could, which of your hardships would you give up?"

Before I could even reach for an answer, she added the catch. "But you'd have to pick up someone else's instead." And then she started naming them. Losing a child. A body riddled with cancer. Never walking again. Being born somewhere you are not free. The list, once you start it, does not end. Everywhere you look, someone is carrying something.

So I sat in the water and I actually did the math. My twenty-four-year addiction. Four decades trapped inside a religion that ran on fear and shame. Two marriages I could not save. I laid my whole heavy pile of it on one side of the scale, and I looked, honestly, at everyone else's. And I would not trade. Not one piece of it. Not for anything on that list.

Because here is what stunned me about my own answer: the hardest things I have ever carried are the exact things that forged me into the man I am. Take them away and you do not get a happier version of me. You get a stranger. My cross is not what happened to me. It is what made me me.

Part Two

Someone Else's Cross

The weight the highlight reel never shows you

Let me tell you about the person I have admired most, because it shows exactly how comparison lies to you.

Raine is the strongest person I know. She has built a beautiful life. From the day I met her she has been my role model, steady, whole, at peace in a way I spent forty years chasing. If you saw her, you might do what I have caught myself doing with plenty of people: look at the life and quietly wish you had it.

And then you would learn what she carries. Raine has buried two of her children. One lived twelve hours. The other lived eighteen years. I am not going to dress that up or hurry past it, because there is nothing on this earth heavier than what she has walked through, and she has walked it with a grace I still do not fully understand. That is the cross underneath the beautiful life. That is what "having it all together" actually cost her.

I think about that whenever the old pull of comparison comes back. Because it does still come. I will see someone with the money, the house, the easy-looking life, and something in me whispers must be nice. And then I remember Raine, and I remember that every single person with a life I might envy is also carrying a cross I cannot see and might not survive.

But here is the part that undoes me. I would not trade lives with the wealthiest, most carefree person on the planet. Because whatever they have, they do not have what Raine and I have. We have peace. We have a love that has been through the fire and held. There is literally nothing I would take in trade for it.

That is what the highlight reel never shows you. You are comparing your whole cross to someone else's edited photograph, the life, never the weight underneath it. And if everyone set their real cross down on the table and you got to choose, you would pick your own back up every time.

...what is that to you? You follow me.— John 21:21–22 (WEB)

When Peter looked at another disciple and basically asked, Lord, what about him?, that is the answer Jesus gave him. What is that to you. Follow Me. Stop measuring your cross against theirs. You were never given theirs to carry.

Part Three

You Couldn't Have Chosen Better

Only God can see which fire forges instead of consumes

Here is a question worth sitting with: if you could have designed your own life, would you have chosen a single one of the hard things?

Of course not. None of us would. Given the pen, we would write ourselves a smooth road, no addiction, no loss, no betrayal, no failure, no cage. We would choose comfort every time, because we cannot see what comfort would cost us. We would write ourselves shallow, and call it a blessing.

This is what I have come to believe all the way down: we are not qualified to choose our own crosses. We would never once pick the very struggle that would grow us the most, because from the inside it just looks like pain. Only God can see which fire will forge you instead of consume you. Only He knows exactly what each of us needs to walk through to stop leaning on ourselves and finally lean fully on Him.

So let me say this carefully, because the careless version is a lie. God is not the author of my sin. He did not hand me my addiction or my failures, those were mine. But there is nothing, not one thing, not even my worst, that He cannot pick up and turn into a lesson that grows me. Nothing is wasted. He redeemed every last piece, and used the very wreckage to build a man who could finally be of use to somebody else.

That is why I have stopped saying things happen to me. They happen for me.

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.— Romans 8:28 (WEB)

All things. Even this one. Especially this one. You could not have chosen a better cross for yourself than the one you are carrying. I know that is hard to hear from inside the weight of it. But the God who assigned it can see the whole road, and He does not make mistakes with the ones He loves.

Part Four

The Cross and the Weight

You carry one. He carries the other.

Now the most important distinction in this whole reading, because "carry your cross" does not mean "carry the crushing weight of it forever." It never did.

There is a difference between the cross and the weight. The cross is the lesson, the thing you walk through and the person it makes you. You carry that, as long as it takes to learn what it came to teach you, and in a real sense you carry its mark for the rest of your life. The weight is the burden, the crushing, grinding heaviness of the thing. And that you were never meant to carry to the end. You carry it only until you are ready to do the one thing that changes everything: hand it to God.

I know this because I did it backwards for twenty-four years. The entire time I was addicted, I prayed the same prayer: God, take this from me. And He didn't, not for two decades, and I was sure it meant He did not care. I had it exactly wrong. He was not refusing to help me. He was waiting for me to stop asking Him to take it and start being willing to give it. He would not rip it from my clenched hands. He waited until I finally opened them and said, I can't do this alone, and the instant I gave Him the weight, He took it entirely.

Give Him the weight →

You carry the cross. You were never meant to carry the weight.

Watch how precisely Scripture draws the same line. In one breath Paul writes that each man will bear his own load, the pack that is yours. And a few lines earlier, a different word entirely, the crushing weight never meant to be carried alone.

Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. ... For each man will bear his own load.— Galatians 6:2, 6:5 (WEB)

Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. ... For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.— Matthew 11:28–30 (WEB)

You keep the cross. He takes the weight. So hear me carefully: choosing your cross has never meant staying under a weight that is destroying you. Some things are yours to carry and learn from. Some things, the sin, the shame, the harm, the burden crushing the life out of you, are His to take the moment you are willing to hand them over. Sometimes surrender means He makes it lighter. And sometimes it means He lifts the whole thing off and sets you free. Your job is not to carry it forever. It is to carry it until you have learned it, and then to finally, fully, let Him have it.

Part Five

The Daily Choice: Gratitude

Same things. Lack, or gratitude. You choose.

So what does this look like on an ordinary Tuesday, when there is no breakthrough, just traffic and aches and a hard conversation you do not want to have? It looks like gratitude. Not the greeting-card kind. The kind that chooses to see the cross differently.

I learned this in a room during a training weekend. We were told to bring in items that represented abundance. I brought a wall of photos of my family, and Raine, and her kids, for the abundance of love around me. I brought a stack of the books I had read, for the abundance of knowledge at my fingertips. And I brought a cross, for the abundance of grace poured over a man who earned none of it.

Then the facilitator asked a question that rearranged me. Did you have these things before this weekend, back when you felt defeated and not enough? Of course I did. I had every one of them. So what changed? Nothing changed. The photos, the books, the grace, all of it had been there the whole time. The only thing that changed was that I finally stopped counting what I lacked and started seeing what I had.

That is the daily choice. God is in everything and in every moment, and you get to decide, all day long, whether you will look for Him and learn, or deny Him and suffer. The ache in your body is a gift, it means you can still feel. The dry eyes when you wake are a gift, it means you can still see. The long drive in traffic is a gift, it means you have somewhere to be and a way to provide. Nothing happens to you. It happens for you.

Part Six

Create From It

You can't choose the cross. You choose what you make of it.

Let me correct something you might be assuming by now, because it is the difference between freedom and a nicer-sounding cage. You do not get to choose your cross. But you are not powerless in front of it either, because you get to choose what you create from it.

Here is what I have come to know about you and about myself: we are creators. Not because we are gods, we are not, and I will guard that line with my life, because I once believed the lie that I could become one and it nearly destroyed me. We are creators because the Creator lives inside us, and His life in us is always making something. The only question is what.

Standing in front of the same exact cross, you can create two completely different things. You can create resentment, and jealousy, and the slow poison of wishing you had someone else's life. Or, from that very same cross, you can create peace, and growth, and gratitude, and a compassion for other hurting people that you could never have manufactured on a smooth road. Same cross. Opposite creations. And which one comes out of you is not decided by your circumstances. It is decided by you, every day, with the life of God in your hands.

That is what it actually means to be a creator. Recognizing the cross you have been given, and then deliberately building peace and love and lessons out of it. That is His power, working through you, turning the hardest raw material of your life into something good. A branch does not choose the storm. But a branch connected to the vine turns even the storm into fruit.

So stop waiting for a different cross before you will start living. It is not coming, and you would not want it if it did. Pick up the one that is yours, look it dead in the eye, and ask the only question a creator ever needs to ask: God, what do You and I make out of this?

Part Seven

The Invitation

Put down the comparison. Pick up your cross.

Somewhere out there is a life you have been quietly wishing was yours. And you have spent more hours than you would admit measuring your cross against it and coming up short, resentful, tired.

Put it down. Not your cross, the comparison. Because comparison is the only weight in this whole reading that God is not asking you to carry and learn from. It has nothing to teach you. It only steals.

Your cross is yours. It was measured for you by a God who can see the whole road and loves you too much to hand you a life that would leave you shallow. It is forging you into someone this world needs. And you do not carry its weight alone one second longer than it takes to learn it, because the moment you are willing to open your hands, Jesus takes the burden and leaves you the lesson.

What is that to you? You follow me.— John 21:22 (WEB)

So choose it. Not once, every morning. Choose your own cross, on purpose, with gratitude, and start creating something beautiful out of the very thing you once begged God to take away. And if the weight of yours has become more than you can carry, do not carry it one more night alone. Hand it over.

Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest.— Matthew 11:28 (WEB)

Which cross is yours? The one you would choose again, once you truly understand what it is making you. Go carry it well.