It could take the form of the textbooks you use to teach your students, the tools you wield at the construction site, the computer that produces the reports and graphics that keep your business humming along.

Yours may be the soup you make and serve at the local pantry or the soccer ball you use to coach a team of excited six and seven-year-olds.

Some of the most beautiful ones are the ear that is always ready to listen, the shoulder always available to cry on, the smile that readily comforts, the heart that breaks with another heart.

For some, it is the wheelchair required to maneuver through life or the medicine needed to even have a life.

Believe it or not, spouses are sometimes big ones for one another; good friends readily accept each other as one.

They are all crosses – our crosses. We tend to think of crosses as burdens, things — and people! — that demand so much energy and time from us. We see our sufferings and our brokenness as “crosses” that condemn us to incomplete and unfulfilled lives of sadness and despair. Most days we would like to lay our crosses aside and never pick them up again.

But our real crosses — the crosses God places on our shoulders and Christ bears with us — are sources of hope, of joy of discovery, of life, of resurrection for both ourselves and others. They are not the extent of our lives but the means to living our lives to the fullest, the vehicles for discovering the meaning and purpose of this journey God has set us on.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks us to take up our crosses, as he will take up his: with the certain hope that our crosses, when taken up in his spirit of humility and compassion, can be no less than the first light of resurrection.

-Deacon Jay Cormier