Crosses, or sufferings and hardship of all kinds, are a fact of life. God allows it to redeem us. Each person suffers for their own sins and that of others. Certain crosses may be mainly to help “make up for what is lacking in the Body of Christ,” as Scripture says, that is to save souls and bring about the good through God’s grace granted because of faithful people accepting and offering up their crosses for others.
The hard fact is when you are given any cross, you have the choice to not fully accept it and not offer it up, stuck in a state of being disgruntled, or you can fully accept and offer it up. And the hard fact is if you do not you will suffer perpetual torments, whereas if you do that torment will be eventually extinguished and replaced by a state of peace and hope.
A soldier gets his leg blown off during battle. If he mentally fights the fact of what happened he falls into a state of depression or even despair. If he gives up that fight against it, the faster he does, the faster he is okay. He’ll have to do PT and learn how to walk with a prosthetic leg, and re-frame how he thinks about and approaches his daily life in light of the reality he now only has one leg.
Prayer is the main means to do this. We cannot do it on our own, our fallen natures being too weak to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps without help. And since the greatest help we can receive is from God, and since our access to God is first and foremost through prayer, then when hit with a new cross that seems impossible to carry, the solution is to turn hard core to prayer. Not simply external prayer, but intense conversation with God and continuously, repeatedly throwing yourself on God for his mercy with repeated acts of faith, trust, and hope. Every morning when you get out of bed. Every morning when you sit down in your living room to pray. That is where you get transformed from a state of bewilderment and reluctance to suffer, to a state of humility, meekness, willingness to bear the cross, and sustained tranquility.
You really only have one choice if you don’t want to lose your mind and sink into despair. Total acceptance is the portal out of the horror and shock of every major new cross. There is no other way. We have to face that absolute, inescapable fact.
One day you wake up with floaters in your eyes and later the eye doctor says to expect they will never go away. While a very small percentage of people get these, many still do, and many who do adjust and live happy and productive lives despite that cross. Just imaging floaters floating around your visual field.
One man might sink into chronic shock and anger, holing himself up into a dark room closing his eyes, drinking himself into despair. Or he, like others, can grab that bull by the horns and ride it, to reclaim and continue his life. Perhaps the cross could even transform his life. Through spiritual counsel, psychological counseling, advise from his eye doctor, and say an online community of people coping with floaters, he regains hope, learns how to re-frame it in his mind to essentially accept the floaters as benign and ignore them. Perhaps they force him into a very structured daily schedule of prayer and meditation, journaling, and self-growth, just to cope, but in doing so he becomes a renewed or new man, later to ironically thank God for his cross of getting floaters.
The list of crosses is innumerable since there are so many individual, unique situations in people’s lives. Being born with a serious disability, someone close to you dying, losing your job, becoming destitute, finding yourself very alone in life, your doctor telling you you have a fatal illness that will be excruciating. Just imagine you know how hard the cross is for someone dying from ALS, which causes total paralysis including gradual loss of the ability to breath, and one day your doctor tells you that you have ALS.
You do have a choice in that situation. It is an illusion that you only have the choice to panic and emotionally go against it, that you can only react that way, that the situation is outside of your control. You have a choice to not panic, to not emotionally go against it, but rather to deep breath, pray, meditate to remain calm, such as simply taking a walk to clear your mind, and making acts of total acceptance. Total acceptance. Literally saying the words to God over and over “Ok God I accept this.”
Neurological adaptations then happen in the psychological part of the brain, and can happen relatively fast. Negative neural pathways associated with obsessive, panicky thoughts and emotion become subdued or even turned off. New neural pathways are created associated with this state of total acceptance in which the very concept of the cross you are dealing with (ex: an ALS diagnosis) becomes subdued and put in its proper place. The conscious mind is no longer focused on sensory inputs or images of the cross, such as symptoms associated with ALS or visually obsessing looking at your body all day imaging your eventual paralysis. Those concepts fade away to the background, your mind putting them on the back burner. Total acceptance has the power to do that.
There really is no other way to deal with a major cross, as nature itself compels us to remain calm and adjust our outlook continuously to cope.
And after all, as horrible as ALS sounds, and is experienced by some ALS patients, that will not necessarily happen to each one, considering that the word “horrible” means “able to evoke horror.” And as radical as this sounds, the newly diagnosed person with ALS is able to control their mind and emotions to avoid ever entering into a state of complete horror. They would likely have at least a fleeting taste of it, but with free will and pre-established good habits of the mind, it can be only fleeting. This is not to say that those who do fall into horror are always morally responsible if they do, or that everyone can avoid this, but rather because we are made in the image and likeness of God, with intellect and free will, which are literally divine-like powers, and because of God’s grace, we certainly do have the capacity to never fall into that horror.
I do not have to research this to know that I am certain that on this planet there are people living with ALS, despite all the pain and discomfort, actually never through it all ever falling into a state of horror, panic, or despair, but are able to maintain calm and inner peace until their time comes. This is not to say there must be ALS patients completely devoid of mental or emotional suffering dealing with their illness, as certain negative human emotions are natural and God given, such as a moderated amount of grief and sorrow.
But I am saying it is certainly possible to avoid ever falling into a dark place with any cross no matter how big. For me, I can say I’ve learned this lesson the hard way, responding with shock and anxiety to certain crosses, to be stuck in a state of worry and frustration. Knowing myself, for the most part, I can say that fortunately it seems I wasn’t sinning, or at least gravely, not entirely in control of my will to choose to frame the situation in the most hopeful light. This was because I was not strict about a daily schedule of prayer as I blogged about the other day, which if it had been in place, surely I would have been more resilient and not delay as long as I have total acceptance of my crosses and surrender to God’s will.
We should all strive to cultivate in ourselves that pious devotion that builds in us a level of fortitude that will withstand any wind no matter how strong or violent, but nonetheless throw ourselves immediately onto God, literally to put our soul into His with total surrender and reliance on Him, especially the more overwhelmed we get.
God knows how to orchestrate the rehabilitation of the mind in crisis. A woman suddenly paralyzed after a car accident, which happens every day, must reorganize her mind to be as much in a stable state as it was before the accident. And no matter how much fortitude she lacks, or weak her faith, it only takes a small amount of faith genuinely given, what the Scriptures call “faith the size of a mustard seed” to achieve the goal, which is peace of mind.
This is the power of total acceptance of our cross, through continuous prayer. I talk about this actually as a meditation to help me totally accept my current crosses, and also to help those readers who right now may be struggling not only with a major cross, but with reaching total acceptance.
The human mind is by design resilient, able to continuously re-frame itself to every new challenge, and also, as Scripture says, “I can do all things through Christ Who strengtheneth me.”
I do hereby give total acceptance of every one of my crosses and offer them up to God, in reparation of my sins, and for others. And so I receive the peace of God that sustains me.