Custom Crosses

Amanda Woodiel contemplates how each cross in our lives is meant to drive us back to God. 

The Lord God made for the man and his wife garments of skin, with which he clothed them. (Genesis 3:21) 

I flipped through an old notebook of mine and found something I had written 16 months previously, a few months after my oldest son had finished chemotherapy for rhabdomyosarcoma:  

I picture the Lord fashioning our cross for us the way He fashioned those first clothes for Adam and Eve. Every cross is given to us for the sole purpose of bringing us back to Him. As He fashions our particular cross, He lovingly crafts it so that it corrects whatever in us draws us away from Him. And that is why we must go through the cross — to pick up and carry our cross — to get to heaven. 

The First Clothes 

Those first clothes Our Lord made for Adam and Eve after the Fall (I love picturing the garments as teeny doll clothes in His hands!) were clothes of mercy. A few verses earlier, we see that Adam and Eve had already tried to clothe themselves by sewing together fig leaves and making loincloths. Can you imagine learning to sew for the first time — and naked, no less? The terror, shame, confusion, bafflement, and sorrow they must have felt as they tried to mitigate the consequences of that first sin!  

God sees His beloved first children in their ragtag clothing, and how His fatherly heart must have been moved by their childish efforts! In his first gesture after enumerating the curses that have now been unleashed by their disobedience, He performs a corporal work of mercy: clothing the naked. 

Crosses are Permitted by Love for Love 

Could it be that our own crosses are just as lovingly crafted by the Father as a spiritual work of mercy? The first clothes were a corporal work of mercy to cover up our shame. Our crosses, though, are fashioned not simply to cover up our shame but to lead us back to Him Who delivers us from shame, to the One who lifts the crown of shame from our heads and replaces it with a crown of glory.  

Each cross you are asked to carry, big and small, is permitted by God’s permissive will. God does not will evil, but He does allow it to happen and when He does, it is always for one reason: to bring souls into a deeper relationship with Him.  

This means that each cross in your life, from a difficult in-law to chronic pain to a toddler having a really bad day, is permitted by Love for love. It is meant to drive you back to the Father’s arms almost as a homing device. This explains why our crosses are different — because they are each remedies for particular attachments or vices and because they are each tailored to our temperaments.  

Our Fiat Is Necessary 

Of course, as you know, crosses don’t magically bring us back to the Father. We have to dispose our will to collaborate with His graces. But something as simple as, “God, this is hard.  

I surrender myself and [this circumstance] to You” will unleash graces in your life, and if you intentionally unite your own cross with the cross of Jesus, then the infinite graces of His cross will be poured out into your life and into others’ lives.  

This Lent, I challenge you to see your crosses — big and small — as lovingly-crafted gifts of love from the Father and as invitations to enter ever deeper into the Father’s heart and, ultimately, into the love you will find there. 

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Copyright 2025 Amanda Woodiel
Images: Canva