LOVE HUNG ON A CROSS by Patience Jedidah

in Articles By Mccuon on 31 May 2024

I thought love was flowers and chocolates and candle-lit dinner dates. Or sleepless nights because reality is finally better than dreams.

I thought love was long hugs that leave you breathless and kisses that lift you off your feet. Or the fantasies after.

I thought love was staring into the starry night sky together as a couple or walking towards the sunset on a beach to a happily ever after.

But love, love is knowing I’ve denied Him three times. Daring even to invoke a curse on myself. Swearing. Yet coming back specifically for me. Preparing breakfast for me. Seeing through my guilt and looking me with eyes that whisper forgiveness. And please don’t say I am not Peter. I am. Am just here 2000 years later.

Love is knowing I will betray Him with a kiss, yet still calling me a friend, taking His last moments to share His last meal with me. I know I am not Judas. No. Because I would have used a Fentanyl overdose. Quick and painless. We are all the same…in different kinds of ways. Can you…can you relate?

Love is seeing me mocking and beating and spitting. Accusing falsely. Yet forgiving me. Saying I know not what am doing. And No. I am not the soldiers. Neither the Roman ones nor the Hebrew ones. I am worse. I would have used my sword. Cut Him. To see His face grimace because His calmness and comeliness would have hurt my ego.

Love is letting me drive nails into the hands that made me, made the heavens and the earth. I wasn’t there but I did. My sins were the nails. My past, my present and my future sins. The nails that pinned Him to the cross. Pinned the feet that spread good news wherever they went.

Love is being whipped, stripped, wounded, rejected and despised, bearing my griefs and carrying my sorrows. Because of my iniquities, for my healing.

Love is owning the whole world but choosing my heart to live in. My unrepentant and sinful heart. My heart made of stone, melting it to flesh.

Love is taking my filthy, torn and dirty rags of self-righteousness and giving me His pure, white garment of righteousness.

Love is freeing me from my prison of self-loath. Teaching me to love myself. Telling me I am fearfully and wonderfully made even though Jack said I have a football pitch of a forehead.

Love is The Righteous, dying for my unrighteousness.

Love is not as heart-shaped as I thought. Love is cross-shaped.

True love was born on Easter…and it hung on a cross…on Good Friday.