The Forgotten Cross

It sits there in the little balcony overlooking our hill. It should have been lighted all Christmas season long. All it asked of me was to plug it in. Its warm, yellow glow should have been cast across our home like a comfortable, familiar blanket you'd wrap around yourself to keep out the cold. Instead, the gloom of these short winter days crowd in relentlessly.

It waits for me still, but now I will come only to take it down. I'll fold down its short arms. Lower it to the ground. Store it away in the crawl space below our house to keep it safe for next year. It's my cross I made--A couple different lengths of black PVC roped with bright lights to shine the symbol of the Good News of Christ.

It's the cross I forgot about all Christmas season long.

It's true. It helped that for the first time in a while, my dad was the main Christmas light setter-upper this year. But still, I had time to haul the cross up there to our balcony . . . I just never remembered to plug it in.

I can't help but feel a similar parallel to my faith the past month. It's there--steady, never in doubt of falling. And yet, it isn't shining. It feels almost forgotten even, or at least neglected. My devotions have been almost non-existent. Men's Bible Study and Church have been like little islands of light and hope I robotically swim to, walk across, and plunge into a sea of apathy on the other side. I've let all the distractions this season offers deaden my faith.

The analogy holds: like the cross, I haven't been plugged into my power source. I haven't been consistently abiding with Christ, and the witness my life should be as a Christ follower has been very dim. In this dark, desperate world, I've slipped into a pattern of selfish distractions that has kept my light from shining. My faith is there, yes, but it hasn't been alive for others to see and benefit from.

Thank goodness, I am committed to a God who will never wander from me and loves me more than I can even fathom. Who but Jesus would stay in a relationship so one-sided? Would you, if you were barely acknowledged day in and day out? Would you love someone who hurts you day after day in so many ways through his sin?

I am so humbled by that thought alone, and it awakens my love and desire for the Lord. It's more than that, though. My Sovereign God aligned several things to strike me all at once on Sunday. The first was a timely message from one of our visiting missionaries, reminding me that every Christian life consists of peaks and valleys. The valleys aren't abnormal, but they can be escaped through praise, prayer, and consistent time in God's word.

The second was a devotion I read by Ray Comfort. I was challenged to consider how my life was showing how thankful I was for Jesus's sacrifice for me at the cross. Not much currently, I had to admit. At the bottom of the page there was a prayer to pray, thanking Jesus and committing to live in gratitude. I prayed that prayer full-heartedly, which led to a longer prayer pouring out my heart.

It was as if this sip of everlasting water showed me just how thirsty I really was. I couldn't drink fast enough.

The third hit me as I rolled into bed after midnight. A new year--an oft-realized chance for a fresh start. I committed then and there that priority 1# for the New Year was reviving my spiritual walk. No more apathy. No more spiritual dehydration. It feels so nasty when you start coming out of it, really. Like the Steven Curtis Chapman song says so fittingly: "I'm playing GameBoy standing in the middle of the Grand Canyon/ I'm eating candy sitting at a gourmet feast/ I'm wading in a puddle when I could be swimming in the ocean/ Tell me what's the deal with me/ wake up and see the glory."

So, here's my prayer for all of us in the New Year: May we take this time to recommit our lives to Jesus, that we will wake up and see His glory and live every moment for it. Let's not forget the cross. The distractions we can get wrapped up in are a pathetic, life-sucking trade-off in comparison. May we all make resolutions that will trim out these distractions and maximize our potential for Christ. He's given us each different gifts and desires to use in service of Him; let's not waste them! 

It's truly the only way to really live.