Taking up the Cross

The more changes that I would make, God would show me more areas that I needed to change. And with these choices to change came a cost. With the choice to dress modestly and to eventually start wearing a veil came ridicule and separation from my friends and family. With the choice to separate myself from worldly things like TV, going to the movies, listening to worldly music, and celebrating holidays came more separation from family and friends and misunderstandings. My family and friends started to think that I was being brainwashed. I even had some of my closest friends try to talk me out of doing these things and they tried to tell me that it was crazy to believe in such things. Some of these friends also said that they believed that “since there is a God, then there has to be a goddess”.

I realized that real Christianity required choosing to do what was right, no matter what the cost, and that there always was and is a cost for choosing to follow Christ. The bible calls it“taking up the cross”. When you take up a cross, you are picking up an instrument of death. When you follow the bible, you choose to pick up a cross daily and die to your feelings, your desires, even your own reasoning. This is meant to try those who choose to follow Christ to see if they are genuine or not. The modern church would make it an easy choice to follow Christ by just saying a prayer, getting your golden ticket into Heaven, being an avid church member and still enjoying life the way you always have. You see, there is no cost in that type of choice, but only gain. Christ requires us to give our lives back to Him, and to let Him control every part of our lives. This was something so new to me. I had never seen anyone doing this in the modern church circles that I had attended. So I had to scrap all the junk I had been taught from those churches, since they weren’t even trying to follow the bible in the everyday simple things like dressing appropriately, purity in marriage, loving your neighbor, loving your enemies, the order in the home etc...