A number of years ago I was looking to buy a good size wooden cross, maybe a foot tall or so, to have around the house. I wanted it to be something that would sit on my dresser or some other table around the house. I wanted it to be visible and ‘in the way’ so it wouldn’t just become a part of the wall but something that I saw often. I went to many places looking for one including multiple Christian stores and every other place I could think. Of course they had crosses, but they are always the metal fancy crosses and I didn’t want that so I decided to make my own. Easy enough. Get some wood, mark it up, and cut it to the size that I am want, boom, cross. For the past 6-7 years I have kept this around and it has spent time on my computer desk, in my living room and sometimes hung on the wall. Recently my cross has been part of an assortment of things on my dresser. If you look at the picture, there are a bunch of things that I like on there and it says quite a bit about me. There are some bullets for my SKS Russian Assault Rifle, my hat from when I worked in New Orleans, a cool floating pen that I picked up from a NASA base, notes from my wife Melanie, hiking magazines that were given to me, and a number of other things. Underneath all of this is the cross.
This struck me as a metaphor of something we can easily fall into. When you first turn to Christ it is the biggest thing in your life and years later it still is! What in life could surpass this massive change? I don’t think anything could, but unless I work to keep life focused on Christ, I may unknowingly block out Jesus. Looking at these things on my dresser, nothing is bad in itself and nothing by itself is large enough to block out the cross but when everything is piled together and my thoughts and attention are divided among many things, I may lose focus on the cross and it may end up being obscured by a pile of interests and activities.
Half the battle is realizing the problem, now I need to move forward and clean the clutter so I can refocus on the cross.
