How I Learned To Measure My Cross

Posted by Terence Allen on Jan 20, 2011 in Daily Bread | 3 comments

A year and a half into my first marriage, things began to fall apart. The dreaded D word was uttered in June of 1992, which led to a slow, painfully agonizing separation and eventual divorce that was final in January of 1994.

What do we do when we lose the love of someone we hold dear? Not someone who love is lost because of death, but someone who continues to live, but doesn’t want to live with us? I can tell you what I did. I went through all of the stages of grief. I felt lonely, abandoned, and betrayed. I not only felt this way about my ex-wife, but also about God. Where was He while I was going through this? Why didn’t He rescue the marriage? What had I done to deserve this?

Five and half years later, I started attending CCC. God used CCC in a number of ways – through people, teaching, and the counseling ministry to lead me back to the Cross. When I was confronted by the truth of The Cross, I didn’t get pat, feel-good answers to all of my hard questions. What I did get was a better understanding of the depths of God’s love for me. There are times in life when we feel victimized by situations and circumstances, but at the Cross, Jesus proved once and for all that if we accept Him for who He is and what He represents, we are not victims, but we are usurpers. We are not pawns, but princes and princess in a Kingdom of grace, mercy, and love that has no beginning and no end. I discovered that no matter what happened to me, I could deal with it because Jesus had taken up His Cross, which allowed me to take up mine.

I was able to recover from the hurt and pain of divorce because our God is a God of restoration and healing. God has blessed and allowed me to help others just I received help. Our earthly ministries demand that we return every day of our lives to the Cross so we will remember where we’ve been, how far we’ve come, and how much further still we need to go in our hopeless but necessary attempts to live up to the example that Jesus set for us.