As a young man, I was living out my day to day life without care or consolation. Just me. I found my significance in my own mind and in the pleasures that I frequently hunted for. I couldn’t let myself have moments of quiet, because when the quiet came, I would hear pain. Eventually, the sound of that pain became so deafening that I had to search for what the sound was and how to silence it. It shook my very soul.

I searched throughout my world to find the source of the sound, only to find that many people heard the same cries. Those cries drove other men and women to do the most horrible and detestable things, with even some ending their own lives to get away from the madness that the pain brought with it. Without answers, I sought further into the farthest reaches of my world. Then, I came to a hill which had a cross made of wood, poised at the crest.

The cross was large and the wooden beams strong, apparently to hold some significant weight. However, all I saw upon it was a simple man. I noticed a sign on the cross that said the name ‘Jesus.’ Dressed in his own blood, it was from this man that I heard the screams overwhelming of pain, even though he barely made a sound. I approached him and asked why he was there, to which he uttered but a single word, “Love.” The man had been beaten and made raw by whips. I saw nails affixing him to the wooden beams and I could not help but to think of the pain that this man endured. I tried to get him down myself, but it was as if the weight of a thousand worlds had pinned him there. I yelled, “Please, what must I do to help you? I cannot bear your cry!”

The man said that he had placed himself upon that cross because of sin. He said he wanted that sin to be his, even though it belonged to every person on earth. So I begged him, “I am sorry. Please sir, tell me, what must I do?” He replied, “Go forth and tell everyone you meet that there is a man on the cross.” He then explained to me that it would take the strength of love alone to get him down from that cross. Not just from me, but from every man, women, and child. And until everyone lifted him up with one love from a unified heart, there he would drape across those wooden beams, holding those sins as his own.

Now, Jesus asks you as well to go forth with a message that there is a man on a cross. It is a message of the need for love amongst all people, always keeping that cross in mind. The cross and pain that we cannot bear on our own.



DH