Cross and Crown

The title of this book comes from two symbols that sit at the very center of the Christian story, but that speak to something almost every person recognizes, whether or not they'd call themselves religious. The cross represents suffering that is real, undeserved, and sometimes senseless. The crown represents glory, vindication, the sense that the story ends somewhere good. Most of the books written about faith and motivation want to rush you from one to the other. They want to sell you the crown. They want to tell you that if you just believe hard enough, work hard enough, or pray the right prayer, you'll skip the cross altogether and land safely in the glory.This book won't do that. Because it isn't true, and because you already know it isn't true.
What almost nobody tells you what I had to learn the hard way, and what I suspect you're learning the hard way too is that the cross and the crown are not two separate stops on a journey. They are not "the bad part" and "the good part" of a story with a clean line between them. They exist together. The wood of the cross and the gold of the crown are made, in some mysterious way, of the same material: the willingness to keep going when going forward costs you something.This is a book about that space in between. The waiting room. The Saturday between the Friday when everything fell apart and the Sunday when something new began the day that Scripture is almost silent about, the day the disciples must have spent locked in a room with grief and confusion and fear, not yet knowing that anything else was coming. Most of us live far more of our lives in that Saturday than we live in the triumphant Sunday morning. This book is for the people living in Saturday.I want to be honest about something else up front: this is not a book of easy answers. I am not going to tell you that your suffering is secretly a blessing in disguise, that everything happens for a reason you'll someday discover, or that enough faith will make your circumstances change on your schedule. Those are comforting sentences, but comfort and truth are not always the same thing, and I have come to believe that the deepest comfort available to any of us is truth, spoken gently, and walked through together.What I can offer you is this: a way of thinking about your cross that doesn't require you to pretend it doesn't hurt, and a way of hoping for your crown that doesn't require you to deny the pain of today. Between those two things honest suffering and honest hope there is a way to live that is neither denial nor despair. There is a third way. Christians have historically called it faith, though that word has been so overused and so often attached to shallow promises that it may have lost some of its power for you. I'll try, throughout this book, to fill that word back up with meaning.This book is organized in three parts, and they are not meant to be read as "stage one, stage two, stage three" of grief or growth, as though once you finish Part One you graduate and never look back. Real life doesn't work that way. You will find yourself moving between these three sections the Cross, the Waiting, and the Crown many times over, sometimes within the same week, sometimes within the same hour. That's not a failure of the book or a failure of your faith. That's what it means to be human.