The Cross is a reality in our lives, yet in the midst of suffering we see victory, in the midst of trouble, we experience hope. Our contemplation of the Cross is our contemplation of Christ, victim, priest, and king, the Cross stands at the center of our lives and our calling as Christians is to embrace the Cross, to embrace our reality, and to allow the Crucified One to lead us to new life. As we unite our struggles with the Cross of Christ we do so knowing what the Father did for Jesus, He will do for us, with faith in the Resurrection we find in meaning in the difficulties and suffering that we encounter in life.

"Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts."

The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.

The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too.

The cross of Christ is the pledge to us that the deepest suffering may be the condition of the highest blessing; the sign, not of God's displeasure, but of His widest and most compassionate face.

The Cross is not the terrible end of a pious happy life. Instead, it stands at the beginning of community with Jesus Christ. Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death.

"The cross is a very powerful symbol and it symbolizes suffering, but it also is connected to a person who was loving and sharing and his message was about unconditional love. I tried to take a powerful image and use it to draw attention to a situation that needs attention. For me, we all need to be Jesus in our time. Jesus' message was to love your neighbor as yourself and these are people in need."

When I took up the cross I recognized it's meaning. The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately, that you die on.

The cross is not random suffering, but necessary suffering. The cross is not suffering that stems from natural existence; it is the suffering that comes from being Christian. … A Christianity that no longer took discipleship seriously remade the gospel into only the solace of cheap grace. Moreover, it drew no line between natural and Christian existence. Such a Christianity had to understand the cross as one's daily misfortune, as the predicament and anxiety of our daily life. Here it has been forgotten that the cross also means being rejected, that the cross includes the shame of suffering. Being shunned, despised, and deserted by people, as in the psalmists unending lament, is an essential feature of the suffering of the cross, which cannot be comprehended by a Christianity that is unable to differentiate between a citizen's ordinary existence and a Christian existence. The cross is suffering with Christ.

The cross means there is no shipwreck without hope; there is no dark without dawn; nor storm without haven.

The cross is the centre of the world's history; the incarnation of Christ and the crucifixion of our Lord are the pivot round which all the events of the ages revolve. The testimony of Christ was the spirit of prophecy, and the growing power of Jesus is the spirit of history.

Mightier than divisions of infantry and cavalry, more powerful than dynamite and ammonal, more irresistible than poison gas and boiling oil, is the spirit of the cross. It is the one thing in the world that cannot be frightened, discouraged or conquered. It is the one sure way of overcoming personal, industrial, and political oppression. Truly it is the greatest thing in the world.

A cross could be a shape for expressing something spacious; such as the coordinators of space. That could be called its first significance or its first relevance. A cross could equally stand for crossing something out. It could also be a sign of obstruction. An overturned cross, an X so to speak, could be the symbol of mystery, something for the other side. Then I could paint a cross in such a way that a connection is made between two bars, and in doing so convert it into a symbol of the unlimited. So, many different crosses and X symbols occur in my works. [quote from 1988]

God honors some with great suffering and grants them the grace of martyrdom, while other are not tempted beyond their strength. But in every case it is one cross. It is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering that everyone has to experience is the call which summons us away from our attachments to this world. It is the death of the old self in the encounter with Jesus Christ. Those who enter into discipleship enter into Jesus' death.

The cross is the single greatest demonstration of love ever seen. Help them to understand it. Repeatedly call their attention to it. Help them to understand God doesn't simply tell us He loves us; He shows us.

This submission to the threshold of a cross is at the very root of our following Jesus; it changes the game completely.