To Gaze Upon the Cross

Dear Fellow Pilgrim,

I have never believed suffering was optional. I have never thought myself uniquely burdened, as though grief somehow singled me out among the living. I have always assumed suffering was simply part of the landscape of this world—a world fractured by sin, where sorrow has somehow worked itself into the dust beneath our feet. And yet lately I encountered a thought that followed me home and refused to leave quietly: “Grace is activated by the Cross and demands a cross… as the Hebrews in the desert were saved from the poisonous snakes when they looked at the bronze serpent, so we escape from temptations and find salvation if we fix our eyes on the Cross in every situation.” The words lingered with me long after I read them, appearing again in quiet moments, as certain thoughts sometimes do when they have come carrying more than we first realized.

I had heard the story before. I knew it well—or at least I thought I did. The Israelites wandered in the wilderness, suffering beneath the venom of serpents. They cried out for relief, and God answered in a way that has always struck me as strange. He did not remove the reality of what afflicted them. Instead, He instructed Moses to lift up an image of the very thing that had wounded them. The thing that poisoned them became, somehow, the thing through which healing came. And those who looked upon it lived.

I have read those words many times. And yet recently something in them settled differently inside me. Because I know, of course, that Christ is the fulfillment of that serpent lifted high. He is the One raised up. The One who bore what was ours. The One who carried affliction and suffering and death itself, so that by His wounds we might be healed. But another thought quietly entered beside it, and once it arrived I could not quite turn away from it:

What if the serpent also resembles my cross?

What if the very thing I spend my life trying to avoid—the wound, the grief, the suffering, the weakness I wish would disappear—is also the thing I am being asked not to flee?

Because if I am honest, I do not want to look upon it. I do not want to gaze steadily at my instability, my fears, my suffering, or my broken places. I want to turn away. I want to outrun them. I want to believe I can somehow arrive at healing without ever looking directly at the thing that pains me. And yet Christ says: Take up your cross and follow Me. Not outrun it. Not bury it. Not pretend it is not there. Take it up.

And somehow I am beginning to wonder whether there is mercy hidden there too. Because it is unsettling, perhaps even frightening, to consider that the thing that wounds me may also become part of what heals me. That suffering may not merely be an interruption to holiness. That it may not simply stand in the way of transformation. But that somehow, mysteriously, it may become part of the very work itself: to look upon suffering without despair, to look upon weakness without self-condemnation, to look upon affliction without resentment, to lift my eyes not with shame—but with hope.

I think I have spent much of my life wishing certain pains away, waiting for some future version of myself untouched by old wounds, free from struggle, finally whole. But lately I find myself wondering another thing: What if this suffering is not a curse? What if this pain, unwanted though it may be, is carving deeper places in me where Christ Himself can dwell? What if the cross I resist is not evidence of abandonment—but invitation?

Because today, for a moment, I saw my suffering differently. Not completely. Not perfectly. Only for a moment. But instead of resentment, I felt something quieter: acceptance. And perhaps that itself is a kind of mercy. Because crosses remain heavy things. But crosses carried with Christ are never carried alone. And perhaps that is why the Cross continues to stand before us—not as threat, not as punishment, but as invitation. Look. Do not turn away. Do not fear suffering so much that you refuse to gaze upon it. Because perhaps somewhere within the very thing that wounds us, Christ is already preparing resurrection. And perhaps one day we will discover that none of it was wasted.