Cross in my Heart

In church today, I wasn’t listening to the sermon. I didn’t even do as the pastor told us because I felt uncomfortable about spreading my arms and bending my knees like in the cross, while the pastor is doing an altar call for those who want to surrender everything to Jesus. Everyday, I am surrendering my life to Jesus but sometimes I ask myself what this means. What does it mean to really surrender my life to him?

First, I believe that life is nothing if not surrendered to Jesus. For me, to not believe in Jesus as personal Savior and Lord is a dead end. Yet even as I understand what this means, I am not sure If I am able to live the truth of what I believe everyday of my life. Each day, the most difficult task is to love. And “to love one another” is the new command Jesus gave. Because love is active – it can’t merely be told – I am often lost as to how to actualize it.

Do I love my family for example? How far am I willing to let go of myself for them? For others maybe, loving their siblings is as natural as eating breakfast and sleeping at night. But for me, I need to exert some real effort and without the proper motivation, I simply give up. Recently, I was again reprimanded for “not taking care of my brothers and sisters.” But how am I going to do that? If they keep on falling because of unwise decisions, how am I supposed to be there when my presence wasn’t needed in the first place? Sometimes I pray that God may give me back the authority of the eldest daughter that I seemed to have lost. I am fully aware that I am my “brother’s keeper” yet my greatest dilemma is how I may show this in concrete terms. I think here is where my path begins. Yet here also, is where I stumble.

That nobody in my family reads me is one of my sadness. Sure I’ve written plenty of poems and articles, and because I seem to divulge my soul when I write, I can’t show them all that I write. (This blog is my bravest piece). I have a bag of notebooks in my room, a filing cabinet full of unfinished works, a mini-library of sorts, but for what are these things? Why should they exist? Who will ever read them? After we built a cabinet inside my room, I suddenly wanted to burn all these but I can’t. Soon that time of burning may still come.

This morning in church, while everybody is standing and praying with their eyes closed, my head is buried in my arms, and I was thinking of many lost opportunities. Call them lost chances in happiness. I was thinking of that somebody I wanted very much to know, to tell all that I feel, to hug and to embrace. Maybe he’s the father I never had, or the sibling I wanted to reach out to, or even my mother who is becoming more and more elusive. Somehow, I was grieving for all lost time of knowing another person, loving and being loved. And I do not mean merely in the sense of a coupling.

I saw my friends in church today; we were the first batch of young professionals in our home church here in Batangas. One of them, a missionary is leaving in July to go to France for a language study because she has been sent to Tunisia as tentmaker under the Send International Ministries flag. Another one is going to the US because her sister in law has paid for her and her husband’s fare and they are going to stay there until June. In between, they are going to enroll in a Menonite University for some modular course related to their professions. The other one is going to Cebu to minister to the Badjaos there. I was yearning to talk to them, for old-time reminiscing maybe, for some updates. So I told them we should meet some place and talk before they all leave. But everybody is already too busy for the preparations. Even my friends have become too inaccessible for some “knowing” time. This is another sadness.

But while I thought about what it really means to spread my arms as Jesus arms were spread on the cross, and to bend my knees as Jesus’ knees were bent due to the nailing of his feet, I realized that I am not alone in my sadness. Here is God, all knowing, becoming man and suffering all those indecencies. Even his closest friends betrayed him. I kept thinking that many in history have suffered like Jesus: missionaries burned or hacked to death, Christians thrown to the lions in the coliseum, believers hanged upside down for their beliefs, evangelicals imprisoned because they are witnessing for Christ. But since their lives were fully surrendered to Christ, they changed history and kept this dying world alive in hope.

I know what I should surrender to Jesus. I should surrender my indifference, my independence. It is never Christian to be on my own. Even singles are to be part of the work in the kingdom, woven in the fabric of the community of believers, responsible to care for those who may need their care and love. A life surrendered to Jesus is a life involved in the well-being of other people.

I am praying that the rest of my life will not be wasted, that whatever talents, gifts, resources and strength God has given me will be used by Him in the harvest field. Right now, I really do not know what this means in the actual sense. I just know in my heart that this is the best and only way to go.

Find Us Faithful
Steve Green

We're pilgrims on the journey
Of the narrow road
And those who've gone before us line the way
Cheering on the faithful, encouraging the weary
Their lives a stirring testament to God's sustaining grace

Surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses
Let us run the race not only for the prize
But as those who've gone before us
Let us leave to those behind us
The heritage of faithfulness
Passed on through godly lives

Chorus
Oh may all who come behind us find us faithful
May the fire of our devotion light their way
May the footprints that we leave
Lead them to believe
And the lives we live inspire them to obey
Oh may all who come behind us find us faithful

After all our hopes and dreams have come and gone
And our children sift through all we've left behind
May the clues that they discover
And the memories they uncover
Become the light that leads them
To the road we each must find

Repeat Chorus Twice

Oh may all who come behind us find us faithful
Oh may all who come behind us find us faithful