take up your cross

What did Christ mean when he told his disciples that anyone following him must "take up his cross and follow me"? I cannot follow in sandaled feet down dusty Palestinian roads with nothing but the clothes on my back: too many things call me back to my own continent, my livelihood, my books and belongings, my family. For those that could, and did, leave everything to take up the burden of discipleship during those uncertain times, what did it do to their families? Did they ever go back to fishing for a living? This is not the first time I've wondered about this, of course, but the first time that the real weight of adulthood, sitting squarely on my shoulders, has made me wonder what other burdens might take its place, what lighter or heavier loads might eventually rest there. What cross is mine to take up now, and where must I go with it?

I didn't think of anything in my life as much of a cross to bear while growing up, even as I heard sermons and lessons about it. By the end of college, I had come to identify the pervasive loneliness that had crept over me and settled for four years--a loneliness I knew would only leave with the arrival of romance--as my cross to bear. All else was really right in my life, and this one thing the source of pain, fatigue, and emotional splinters in my side. To call it a cross was my way of acknowledging its very real presence, while propelling myself forward out of self-pity and debilitating self-awareness. When romance did come, and stayed, life was suddenly more bearable, and I more resilient. We might say that carrying a burden strengthens a person in specific ways, but most of us are (and ought to be) relieved to find our tasks simpler and more fluid when we are free to perform them without the extra weight.

If I had to guess, I would say that my cross now is my work: a constant source of dissatisfaction, it daily steals my joy and makes me feel...so...old and uninspired. Short of that, all else is basically well. So how should I bear that cross? I put it down, kick it around, complain of splinters, and then pick it up again for a few more hours. I "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," and grudgingly, but what in my work is God's and ought to be rendered more cheerfully?