Take Up Your Cross

God gives everybody, I think, a cross, when He enters upon a Christian life. when it comes into the believer's hands, what is it? It is the rude oak, four-squared, full of splinters and slivers, and rudely tacked together. And after 40 years I see some men carrying their cross just as rude as it was at first.

Others, I perceive, begin to wind around about it faith, hope, and patience, and after a time, like Aaron's rod, it blossoms all over. At last their cross has been so covered with holy affections that it does not seem anymore to be a cross. They carry it so easily and are so much more strengthened than burdened by it, that men almost forget that it is a cross, by the triumph with which they carry it.
--Henry Ward Beecher