Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: Cross (as in the Cross of Christ) (08/17/06)
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TITLE: The Cross is Back | Previous Challenge Entry
By Darryl Nicholson
08/23/06 -
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Easter can fall on a cold Sunday in March with the wind driving flakes of snow down your collar or a beautiful spring Sunday in April when the sun is up and turkeys are calling from the woods. This cross has seen them all.
So I see it’s back again. Maybe I will take it to my barn and store it until next spring. A couple more winters out behind the church and the rugged cross may be beyond rugged.
It wasn’t always old and rugged. I built it a couple years after I came back to the church. I was baptized there, went to Sunday school there, got confirmed. Then I went away. For about thirty years. I never left town, but I was away.
At one time we had no sunrise service. Our church decided that we should have one. Someone said we should have an old rugged cross. As a carpenter I was thinking that the cross of the first Good Friday was probably new.
Mr. Harrison had some rough cut planks for sale. I was thinking eight inches square. Good thing he didn’t have any. We would have needed a crane to hoist it. He did have some four by eights. I used these.
There really isn’t a lot to building a cross. Cut two pieces, chisel a notch in each, and fit them together like Lincoln Logs. Drill some holes and drive in wooden pegs to hold it together. How big to make it, though?
That took some thinking. I mean if it was to be the actual size, I wanted it to be actual size. The Bible doesn’t say how big the cross was. I just considered the likely dimensions necessary to accomplish it’s grizzly purpose.
I began to depart from the realm of the normal woodworking project. With every cut, every swing of the mallet, the task became heavier, like building a gallows, but worse. A man can stretch his arms about six feet so that’s how long I made the cross piece. How far is it from the center of one’s chest to one’s feet? Dark, disturbing calculations. When I began, I had intended to lay down on the cross, arms out stretched to check the proportions, but I couldn’t do it.
On Easter morning I stumbled out of the house to warm the car. The idea of getting up at five thirty didn’t seem as attractive as it had the night before. I looked in the direction of the hill and, through the maze of branches, a tiny cross shown like gold as the sun cleared the hills. There was nothing rugged about the cross that morning.
It spent the following winter in my barn. The next year it was a mellow gold, the next, silver. Now it is weathered, rugged and silvery. I guess I could make another one, but I don’t know. I watched it weather and change as I’ve weathered and changed.
There used to be a lot of things I didn’t understand about the cross, like why is Good Friday called “good” when Jesus was crucified then? Why did He have to die at all? I know now.
It starts with confusion but a desire to understand. After some study, I began to feel a certain self-assurance, a sort of competence in the faith. God began to show me my sin. Not a lot, lest I’d go step in front of a bus. Just a little. A little self- centeredness, a little hypocrisy, a little unforgiveness, envy, pride, anger, malice.
I don’t feel competent anymore, nor self- assured. Strangely, that’s a good thing because self-assurance can become self-importance. Then comes the illusion that we don’t need a savior. The cross becomes irrelevant.
As for me, I need a savior. Funny thing is, it’s taken me about the same amount of time to figure this out as it has for that bright new cross to become rugged and silvery. I could make a new cross, but these days I feel sort of rugged and silvery myself. I guess I’ll stick with the one we’ve got.
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Great job!
It is only when "the Jesus" becomes "my Jesus" can one truly appreciate the cross in all it's heartwrenching beauty.