We are each the Father's YES - YES to His very idea of us, YES to His love for us, YES to our existence here and now - and His gift to the Son.
And the Crucifixion is Christ's YES to the Father's will, which made us each His gift back to the Father. Bought at a great price, we are not our own.
Alive in the Holy Spirit (this living love between the Father and the Son), we are a new creation, awakened to the fuller reality vibrating just beyond sense - we hear the Voice of the Shepherd, see the Way that seemed hopelessly hidden, feel this new Life pulsing within us.

And if God said YES to us, how can we ever say NO?

It is all too human to expect things to go as we want them to go, and whine or outburst when they do not. Experiencing the cross always seems like some kind of aberration, not the natural way of things. We so easily forget that Christ told us to pick up our cross each day and follow Him. We forget that unless the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it cannot bear fruit.

Sometimes, this tomb of earth is a welcome idea - a dark, quiet place of waiting - and seems preferable to whatever we are going through at the moment.
Certainly, it seems preferable to being crushed by God's millstone and ground down to something unrecognizable. It often seems that things get "piled on" and negative things keep happening at every turn - we are ground and then ground finer and finer. We want to say it is enough, but the finest flour makes the finest bread.

It is when we are ground down and re-formed that we become new matter over which He can truly say, "THIS IS MY BODY."

When we are cruciform, we most closely resemble Christ.

"Do we experience belonging as a threat to our freedom, or as a fulfillment of our identity?
Is to be human to live for a reality greater than we, or is it to live for ourselves?"
~Lorenzo Albacete