Certified Biote Provider

The Cross

A patient recently gave me this beautiful cross:

I have never really appreciated beautiful crosses like this.  To me the cross represented incredible pain and suffering.  The cross was the Roman government’s most brutal form of punishment, a warning to anyone who stepped out of line with Rome’s interests.  It was the exact opposite of beautiful, it was hideous, but as I look at this intricate, beautiful necklace I see that actually what Rome intended as something terrible, God made into the most beautiful thing of all: salvation to anyone who believes.  This is so like God and it reminds me of my favorite song “Beautiful Things”.  Here are the lyrics:

All this pain

I wonder if I’ll ever find my way

I wonder if my life could really change, at all

All this earth

Could all that is lost ever be found?

Could a garden come out from this ground, at all?

You make beautiful things

You make beautiful things out of the dust

You make beautiful things

You make beautiful things out of us

            Gungor

That is how incredible God is!  He makes beautiful things out of our pain, out of our suffering, out of our selfishness, out of our cancer and out of our addictions.  He doesn’t give us these things, but if we let him he can take these terrible things and make something beautiful out of it.  No one else can do that.  We can treat the cancer, the pain, the disease, but we can’t make it beautiful.  I try my best each day to treat pain, but I am so inadequate to the task.  Daily I look to God to take me and use me and make me beautiful.  He did it with the cross and he promises to do that for us too.  Jerimiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you”, declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”  

Thank you my friend so much for this incredible gift and thanks be to God and to Jesus Christ who through his sacrifice made the cross beautiful for us all.