The Comfort of the Cross

“Like Our Lady, remain at the Cross of Jesus, and you will never be deprived of comfort.” – St. Padre Pio

Again this week, I was reminded of the greatness of God and the pure gift of grace that flows from the glimpses He gives us of His Eternal Plan. We are on the reverse side of the tapestry…all the knots and tangled colors seem meaningless so much of the time. How good it is to sometimes see a small piece of how everything, even the human tangles and knots, can be made beautiful by the Creator.

In December, 1997, I got a call at work. My dad had been in an automobile accident and had been killed. It was more than an accident; it was a rash decision by a rushed driver of an 18-wheeler that left every bone in his body broken and his car so smashed that they had to cut the roof off to transport his remains. It was six days after my 28^th birthday; he was buried three days before Christmas.

I didn’t leave the faith, although I’m sure that event is responsible for more than one of my siblings doing so. I was given the grace of a priest who had the right words to help me hang on during those dark, questioning years until I met my husband, we began our family, and I realized good things could again come to me. In retrospect, I see that God was near even on the most difficult days.

Our third child was due on Christmas day, eleven years after my father was killed. Our baby was a scheduled c-section and our doctor only did surgery on Fridays and Mondays so the possible birthday was either the 19^th or the 22^nd. We had the choice; the day my father was killed or the day he was buried. Our child would begin his life on Earth on one of those two days.

It may seem a difficult decision but it was actually a beautiful gift from Our Loving Father. How good he was to first bring this miracle into being and then allow his first breath to be at a time prior-to reserved for only sorrow? We chose the 22^nd, the day my father was buried. We wanted the child that carried his name to begin where my dad left off: the completion of a beautiful thread in our piece of God’s tapestry.

So, when I heard that my dear friend gave birth to her newest miracle on the date that her youngest brother arrived as an adopted child from abroad fifteen years earlier; could it be anything but a human tangle being pulled into a beautiful stitch in her tapestry? You see, her little brother had been killed in an accident more than a year prior to the birth of her newest child. I had tears when I heard the story, as I did with my dad and my own son, but they were tears of comfort. God is always with us. He makes all things good.

The death of my father and my friend’s brother weren’t acts of God. He could have stopped them, yes, but He did not for reasons we will not know here. What we also didn’t know, as we were bearing our Cross through that darkness, was His next stitch in that thread. He would make that tangle, that human suffering, a beautiful creation. He would make that pain, joy. He would take what was broken and make it new.

Do our children erase the pain we endured? No, but we were not promised an absence of pain in this life. By holding on through the pain in faith, however, we have been given a beautiful glimpse of God’s abounding love for us. What a great comfort.