Friday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time
By Melanie Rigney
"... the Lord is God in the heavens above and on earth below ... there is no other. You must keep his statutes and commandments ... that you and your children after you may prosper, and that you may have long life on the land which the Lord, your God, is giving you forever.” (Deuteronomy 4:39-40)
I remember the deeds of the Lord. (Psalms 77:12)
Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:24-25)
Piety
Jesus, I humbly ask for your help in bearing with grace the crosses large and small in my life.
Study
Some of us can lose ourselves in the mystery of the cross. How could Jesus have loved God—and us, just mere mortals with plenty of issues and baggage—to go through those humiliating, excruciatingly painful, indefinable isolated final hours? We look at a crucifix or we contemplate the Sorrowful Mysteries as we say the Rosary on Tuesdays and Fridays and we wonder, how did he do it?
Some of us can lose ourselves in the mystery of our own crosses. Why do we or people we love get sick? Why are we never the ones who get the promotion or win the lottery or catch the traffic light when we’re in a hurry? We look in the mirror or we contemplate our woes with eyes closed and we wonder, how do we do it?
Different crosses, surely. But each with its own pain—and each journey with the same destination, the Heavenly Kingdom.
“The goal we each seek is the cross we each choose,” Joan Chittister wrote. But I didn’t choose my cross, you might say. I didn’t choose to have a degrading job or kids with addiction problems or my own mental challenges.
Oh, but we did choose that cross, to do our best to live a Christlike life here on earth. And sometimes that means showing the love of Christ and faith in God in the most difficult of situations. Sometimes, the cross gets heavy. Sometimes we stumble and fall. But with help from Christ and community, we struggle on.
And sometimes, we get to the place where we can accept and appreciate what Thomas a Kempis said in The Imitation of Christ: “Why then do you hesitate to carry a cross that will bring you to the heavenly kingdom? If you gladly carry your cross, it will carry you and bring you to your desired goal where you will experience no more pain; but this will not be here below.”
Action
Someone you know and have trouble loving is struggling with his or her cross. Provide a kind word or other assistance today.
