I’ve worn a cross around my neck since I was 20. Shortly after I gave my life to Christ, I wanted to express my faith with a timeless symbol. And so naturally I picked a “cool” looking cross necklace from a reputable brand (Armani) and made sure to wear it outside my clothing for all to see.

5 or 6 years later, I went on a weekend trip and stayed at an AirBnB with some friends. When I got home, I realized I had forgotten my necklace. I was bummed. Several months later, my girlfriend (now wife) bought me a replacement stainless steel cross necklace that I still wear to this day.

While a visual reminder of the cross going with me wherever I go periodically reminds me of Jesus’ love and sacrifice for me, I’ve recently been focused on a different kind of cross. A more splintered one. No polish. The rugged kind Jesus carried.

As a product of Western culture, it’s the smooth and manufactured life that I’ve been trained to pursue. A type of life that has tragically been woven into my Christianity. The smooth cross is born of a distorted view of discipleship. Where “die to self” is figurative, detached from personal responsibility and easily dismissed.

It’s only been through the bloody and jagged cuts of the true cross that my spirituality has been awakened and extracted from my conformity to culture and self. Through these cuts and wounds, a new perspective and life has arisen. I still wear my stainless steel cross around my neck. But the cross I now visualize and meditate on is the one that will make me bleed as Christ bled.

“We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Saviour passed when He suffered under Pontius Pilate. Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it.

In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.” A.W. Tozer, Pursuit of God