excerpt.

"God asks each of us to accept our own "cross"... our own wounds, our own limitations, our own personality defects, the damage people have done to us from the beginning of life until today, the pain of the human condition as we have personally experienced it- this is our true cross.

...all this, and more, Christ asks you to accept and allow him to share.

in his passion and death, Jesus has experienced my pain and yours and made it his own. what happens in this encounter with the crucified is that we enter into something that has already happened, our union with Jesus and all that it implies: his taking unto himself our pain, anxiety, fears, shame, self-hatred, and discouragement.

...his cry on the cross was our cry of desperate alienation from God taken up into his and transformed through the ressurection. as we allow ourselves to experience our own pain, we can know that what we feel is Christ suffering in us and redeeming us. rather than condemning ourselves for our weakness and making self-conscious efforts to try harder, we can allow the Crucified to love us in our brokenness."

-brennan manning, 'the signature of Jesus'