He Carried Us

-


 

During the Stations of the Cross, it's easy to picture Jesus carrying a heavy wooden cross.

I've pictured that scene countless times. The weight. The pain. The surrender.

But recently I heard Fr. Jonathan Meyer (a priest from Indiana I follow online) describe something from a live Stations of the Cross that made me look at the Cross in a new way.

Instead of only showing Jesus carrying the wood, one person actually carried another person on his shoulders.

He said people were moved because they didn't just see a person being carried. They saw their own crosses— the suffering of the people they love, the brokenness of the world around them, and the burdens they carry every day.

Then he asked a question that I couldn't stop thinking about. 

What if Jesus wasn't just carrying the Cross? 

What if, in a way I'll never fully understand, He was carrying all of us?

He carried our sins.

Our grief.

Our fears.

Our illnesses.

Our betrayals. 

Our loneliness.

Our shame.

Every burden humanity would ever know.

For a long time, when I heard "carry your cross," I thought it simply meant getting through the painful parts of life.

But I'm beginning to understand the Cross differently. Sometimes the crosses we carry aren't heavy because we don't love someone. They're heavy precisely because we love them so much. 

My children are not my crosses. My loved ones are not burdens placed on my shoulders. They are gifts.

The crosses are the fears, the uncertainty, the grief, the exhaustion, the helplessness, and the trials that come with loving deeply.


For years I prayed for God to remove crosses from my life.

I wanted Him to take away the health issues, the hardest parts, and all the things I couldn't fix.

But maybe I misunderstood what He promised. 

Jesus never promised a life without crosses. In fact, He told us we would have them.

He told us to pick up our cross and follow Him.

Maybe the promise was never a life without burdens. Maybe the promise was that we would never have to carry them alone. 

For a long time, I thought carrying my cross was mostly about what I had to bear.

Now I'm beginning to see that it's also about the One I'm following.

His Cross was never only about the weight of the wood. It was about the depth of His Love.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Acceptance Doesn't Happen Once

-
Image
Reflections from a retreat talk on being called, chosen, and sent as daughters of the Holy Spirit. I used to think acceptance was something that happened once. That eventually you reached a place where you made peace with the hard thing and then moved forward. I’m a wife and a mom of six. And five of my children have some level of disability, autism or Down syndrome. One of my daughters has both. My life has been full and beautiful, but also very different than what I imagined. And it didn’t all happen at once. In 2003, I was already well into navigating life with my twin boys’ autism diagnosis, while also raising their older brother. We were just figuring things out as we went and letting go of what I thought life would look like. I really thought I had found my footing and was handling things pretty well. But I’ve come to see that acceptance doesn’t happen once. It comes in layers.  And over the years, there have been other layers too: Infertility… adoption… other unexpected hear...
Read more

The Life I Thought I'd Have

-
Image
I think most of us carry around a picture of what our lives will look like. We don't always realize we're carrying it, but it's there, tucked quietly in our hearts, shaped by childhood, family, and unspoken dreams. When I was twelve, my parents had a surprise baby, a new sister. There were already four of us, born within five years. My oldest brother was fifteen, my second brother was thirteen and a half, and my younger sister was ten.  I got a front-row seat to motherhood watching my mom love and care for my new baby sister.  I was fascinated by all of it. The growing belly, giving birth, breastfeeding, the endless laundry, the meals cooked while juggling pre-teens and teenagers, and still meeting my father's needs. She managed it in ways that felt both familiar and entirely new to me. Almost three years later, my parents added one more to our family: my youngest brother. My mom was forty-two and my dad was forty-three. To me, my little sister and brother...
Read more

Ordinary Holiness

-
Image
Years ago, we were sitting under the grandstands at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway eating fried chicken during practice for the Indy 500 when an older man stopped to say hello to Lily. Lily was sitting a few feet away from us in her wheelchair. She was playing on her iPad with one hand pressed against her ear, her shoulders hunched, avoiding eye contact and ignoring everyone. Because she's often like this in public, it's rare for people to interact with her.   Moving over to them, I prompted Lily to say hi. She looked up at the man, who looked a little like her Grumpa, and softly said, "Hi," and then held out her hand for the man to hold.  He first grasped her hand lightly and then offered up a fist bump. Lily decided she'd do a high five instead, and this made the man smile. He leaned over to me and said with a strong catch in his voice, "Our daughter was just like her." Then he turned and headed over to the elevator, up to his suite to watch some race...
Read more

Feeling a bit lost in a "perfect" world

-
Do you ever get the feeling like you have a giant booger on your face or maybe forgot to put pants on before leaving the house? I do. I catch people staring or even gawking at us every. single. day. I'm not talking about short little covert glances, but big wide eyed "OMG, would you look at that family!" stares. There are days that I feel like we are the accident in the road and everyone is rubbernecking to get a peek at the gore. Sometimes, it's for the sheer size of our family (which by Dugger's standards, we are kinda small). Other times, it's the "Down's" element. Many times, it's because one or more of the boys are doing something obnoxious, fighting with each other or being disrespectful to us (have you ever tried to rationalize with a teenager on the spectrum?). And wait, we can't forget Leo's pepperoni sized birthmark on his head because it definitely gets it's fair share of horrified looks. Some think I'm...
Read more

Church. Not Sure Where We Fit In...

-
Image
I am Catholic. I was raised Catholic by my mom and she took us to church every Sunday. I also went to Sunday School for years (known as CCD back then, but now called Religious Ed or RE). My dad was supposedly raised Methodist, but as far as I know never went to a Methodist church, except for maybe weddings and funerals. He grudgingly attended Catholic events like baptisms, first communions, weddings and funerals, but preferred to stay as far away from church as possible. Every Sunday, my mom would drag us out of bed, make sure we were dressed and fed before racing (literally) to church. We were usually late and of course everyone noticed. It's kinda hard to be inconspicuous with at first four and then eventually six kids entering a quiet church. I rebelled a bit in high school and refused to go to church even with all the Catholic and mom guilt laid on me. I just didn't care.   My first year at IU (Indiana University), I felt an urge to go back to church and my dorm just ha...
Read more

Feeling a Bit Lost in a "Perfect" World—14 Years Later

-
Image
Fourteen years ago, I wrote a blog post called Feeling a Bit Lost in a "Perfect" World . I recently read that post again for the first time in years. As I read it, I didn't want to change a word.  She wrote honestly about what she knew then. And she was right. She just wasn't finished. If I could sit down with the younger version of myself today, I don't think I'd have all the answers for her. But there are a few things I'd want her to know.  She couldn't have known then that acceptance isn't a place you arrive. It's something that keeps growing, quietly, often without you even noticing.  I'd tell her that joy and grief aren't opposites. Sometimes they sit side by side at the same kitchen table.  One day she'll understand that. She'll grieve leaving Indiana and the home and life we've built there. At the very same time, she'll receive the priceless gift of helping care for my mom during the last year and a half of her li...
Read more

He Was Already There

-
Image
There are certain hymns I've sung hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. Most Sundays, I sing them without giving much thought to the lyrics. They are familiar companions, woven into the sanctity of the Mass. But every now and then, a line catches me off guard. I'll be standing in the pew singing words I've known for years when my eyes begin to sting. A tear slips down my cheek, my voice catches, and I find myself wondering why this song feels different today. The words haven't changed.  I have.  There were seasons God felt far away. Looking back, I don't believe He ever was.  One of those hymns is Be Not Afraid , a song built around the promise that God goes before us. The tears that sometimes come during Be Not Afraid aren't necessarily born of sadness or joy.  I think sometimes they're what happens when your heart recognizes a truth before your mind has fully put words around it.  You hear:  I go before you always. And suddenly you're not hearing a lyri...
Read more

Love in The Repetition

-
Image
My husband's family says "I love you" all the time. My family didn't. That's not because my parents didn't love me. I never doubted that they did. They just expressed it differently.  My mom's love was impossible to miss. She always seemed to know what to say when I was anxious, uncertain, or overwhelmed by a situation. I think her advice mattered so much because it came from someone who consistently lived what she taught. She was the one I went to with worries, questions, and the everyday things that felt big when I was young. I felt safe just being near her and was deeply attached to her. My mom may have rarely said "I love you," but I heard it every day. Throughout my life, my mom always dropped everything when I needed her most. At my children's births, she was right there beside me. She helped Matt and me navigate C-sections, the twins’ NICU stay, and Lily’s Down syndrome diagnosis. She grieved with me during difficult times, but never l...
Read more