XI. Jesus is crucified.
Behold the wood of the Cross…
Pause and hold your heart and the world in your hands.
Handing Himself over to His enemies was an act of trust—trust that His suffering and death would not be meaningless, trust that they would actually lead to something good, trust that His Father would not abandon Him.
It’s easy to pay lip service to “following God’s Will” when it doesn’t require much pain and sacrifice. It’s much tougher when things start going wrong, when the world begins to rear its ugly head as it unfortunately does every so often.
That’s how it was for Jesus then. That’s how it is for us today.
Nothing says “helpless” like a crucifixion. To be crucified to the cross means no turning back. Once He permitted Himself to be nailed to that wood—both hands and feet—that was it. No more turning back.
But nothing also says “trust” like a crucifixion.
When Jesus stretched out His hands and feet, He was surrendering Himself and turning over His fate not to the Jewish leaders and their mob, not to the Roman soldiers, but to His Father.
Jesus’ prayer during his crucifixion might have sounded something like this:
“Here I am. I’m not sure what awaits Me. I don’t know what You have in store. But I’ll hang in here.”
One reason Jesus was able to surrender Himself was He knew the Father so intimately that even when it did not at all feel that way, when it really felt like the Father was distant or even absent, Jesus continued to believe that He was wrapped in His Father’s arms.
Pray that we can exercise the same faith especially when it will matter most. Pray that we can say with Jesus:
“Here I am. I’m not sure what awaits me. I don’t know what life has in store. But I’ll hang in here because I know You are here.”
And as we’ve learned from the experience of Jesus, the key to such unshakable faith is the deep trust that we are, every moment of our lives, held held by the Father’s loving arms, even and especially when it does not feel that way.
Let your prayer for this Station be “Arms of Love”—a song about being held like a child in the most frightening storms. For that is what our Lord does to us.
Feel free to share your thoughts, questions, and prayers below.
One reply on “The Eleventh Station”
Thank you Lord for keeping me warm in your loving arms♥️