Being a loser, bearing the cross

Written for the Men's Lenten Breakfast

            One of the toughest things for us to wrap our heads around is Jesus’ constant reminder that grace requires losing. To be grace-filled is to be a loser.

            Here’s what I mean by that.

            It takes losing something in order to need it; it takes an understanding that we need God in order to enter the kingdom of heaven; and it takes God’s work on the cross to make that possible. All of that is predicated on losing. We lose our perfection, we lose our ability to boast about how great we are, we eventually lose our lives, even as Christ lost his. We are all losers.

            That’s what taking up our cross is like.

            Personally, I don’t like to lose. I’m pretty competitive, especially when it comes to sports and games where chance is taken out of the equation. I hate losing because I have nobody to blame but myself. So I’m always trying to be better. The reason I’m up early biking or running isn’t because I love to bike or run; it’s because I want to be better. The better I am at something the more upset I get when I fail. As Kate could tell you, nothing makes me more upset than losing a chess game. And since I’m airing all my many overly-competitive faults, I also hate losing at Trivia Crack and any other thinking game that doesn’t require chance. I may not show it, but there probably aren’t many people around who hate losing more than me.

            But there comes a point where all of that work turns a corner and becomes something more insidious. I’m not really benefiting the world by being a better runner or bicyclist or chess player. At a certain point I’m no longer doing things for self-improvement; I’m just doing things out of selfishness. Cross-bearing is being a loser, but even worse, it’s being a loser for losing’s sake. It’s saying, “Enough.” All that striving for personal glory gets in the way of taking up our cross and following Jesus.

            Cross-bearing is loving. It’s the kind of thing parents do for children and children may one day reciprocate for their parents. Cross-bearing is selfless. It asks not to be noticed. It is perhaps the only truly good thing in this world, but it’s something we are inherently terrible at. We do things to be noticed; we love conditionally. Most of the time when we lose we do it poorly. Sin is losing poorly, or winning poorly. It’s acting as if triumph is a throne and not a cross. Sin is a lot of things, but cross-bearing is something else.

            Crosses that we talk about bearing in our lives can be anything from petty annoyances to terrible consequences of living in a broken world, but it is not so much the extent of the burden that matters as it is the path you walk with that cross on your back. Are you walking the path of self-help? The path that suggests you will be fine if you just get your life in shape? That is a path that removes your cross and replaces it with an anvil—an anvil of expectations you can never live up to. True cross-bearing can be lonely and it is always, always challenging. But it is also meaningful. Whether it’s recovery from something like addiction or grieving the loss of somebody you love, or something more joyful like children or a marriage, all of these life experiences involve taking up our cross and dying to the “me” that was before and the expectations I laid for the path ahead.

            Cross-bearing won’t necessarily make you feel better—in fact, it tends to kill you—but it will give your life purpose and direction. And, more than that, it will give you a promise that will persist even if you do not. So, when you commit that ultimate act of losing—when you lay dead in the ground—you have a God who can do something with that. That’s the power of cross-bearing.