Apostolate6 The mission of an apostle. To my 6 children and all children of God.

Many a cross we bear is of our own manufacture; we made it by our sins. But the cross which the Savior carried is not His, but ours. One beam in contradiction to another beam was the symbol of our will in contradiction to His own. To the women who met Him on the roadway, He said: "Weep not for me." To shed tears for the dying Savior is to lament the remedy; it were wiser to lament the sin that caused it. If innocence itself took a cross, then how shall we, who are guilty, complain against it?
---Fulton J. Sheen

When out of town recently, I heard a sermon about when Jesus asked the disciples,"Who do you say that I am?" St. Peter replies "You are the Christ, the son of the living God." Then in the next breath he takes control of the conversation to demand that they will defend Jesus and not let Jesus go to His cross.  In which Jesus replies,“Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”The next thing you know is Jesus says" “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."

The sermon I heard was a few days after a man walked a tightrope across a deep gorge at the Grand Canyon. What helps this man to keep from falling? A pole is held perpendicular to the body and grasped with both hands. This helps to decrease tipping and correct sway. The analogy is clear here. Let our hands be full full of the cross so we are more apt to stay on the straight and narrow and we are less tempted and less able to pick up the reins and steer ourselves in a direction away from the concerns of God and toward our merely human ones.