The Cross On Jesus’ Back

By Bill Gaultiere © 2010

The summer before my senior year of college I worked as an apprentice butcher.  If you know me you’re laughing right now: Bill a butcher!

But if you were in the meat market with me for those three months when I was 21 years old you wouldn’t have laughed — you would’ve cried for me. It was one of the most painful times in my life — and one of the most fruitful.

Have you ever been through a time of suffering and cried out with the Psalmist: “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?” (Psalm 13:1-3).

That was David’s experience hiding out in desert caves from the jealous rage of King Saul and his armies were. And it was my experience as a young man. Let me tell you my story. I pray that God will use it to bring you comfort, understanding, and renewed trust in the goodness of God (even when your circumstances and feelings tell you that God is not being good to you).

I Cried on the Inside

The butchers butchered me.

Every mistake I made (there’s a lot more to cutting meat then I realized!) was harshly criticized. And they harassed me at every chance they could because they resented that an executive in the company had put me in their shop, not so that I could learn their trade and become a butcher but as a favor to help me to make money for college.  They ganged up on me and persecuted me for being a Christian. They talked dirty to make me uncomfortable. They cussed at me. They laughed at me.

I held back tears. I tried to be strong. I worked my hardest to do everything right and to be a good Christian witness. But the butchers got the best of me.

I Wanted to Quit

I desperately wanted to quit — the money wasn’t worth it! Every day in the meat market I prayed for God’s help and it seemed that all I got back was the message that he wanted me to endure this persecution like the early Christians that Peter wrote to in 1 Peter. I sensed God say to me: “Bill, this persecution is what I have for you this summer. Trust me. I want to teach you some things.”

I kept crying out to God and getting the same depressing answer.

I became more and more depressed. It was a loooong summer. One day my best friend drove almost two hours just to give me a hug and pray with me on my lunch hour. Every night my mom listened to me and cried for me.

By the end of the summer I was exhausted, broken, and believed I was a failure.  I left the meat market feeling like a dog licking his wounds.

A Word from a Monk

Then I went from the butcher shop into a monastery! I didn’t want to go, but at the start of the summer I had committed to spend three days there to pray about my future in Christian psychology.

Frankly, I didn’t want anything to do with God at that point! I felt like he had disappointed me and abandoned me.

My experience at the monastery wasn’t much better than the meat market! At least I wasn’t abused, but it was a desert wilderness for me. I had never been to a monastery. I had never fasted for three days. I had never been silent and alone with God for three days. I had taken on way too much!

The first thing I did upon arriving at the monastery was to meet with a monk for spiritual direction. Months earlier when I had reserved this retreat I was excited about doing this because of the books I had read from the old spiritual writers who offered spiritual direction ministry, but when I saw my spiritual director I was scared! He was dressed in a long dark robe with a hood and he had dark hair and dark eyes. He seemed strange to me. i felt so awkward. The meeting felt cold and tense and I couldn’t connect with him.

He gave me a book to read but that made no sense to me either!  It was just like my experience of the monk: full of dry, obtuse theology that I couldn’t relate too. The only thing I got out of the book (and the retreat) was that the word “grace” was in the title!

Where’s the Grace?

Based on the book the monk gave me I decided that God wanted to teach me about his grace. But that just confused me — if God wanted me to experience his grace then why did he send me to a meat market to be mistreated and then to a monastery to be abandoned?

My whole retreat was dry bones!!! I spent three days walking around trying to pray, but mostly wrestling with my emotions. I couldn’t feel God’s presence — I just felt hungry? I tried to listen to God but I heard nothing — just the echo of what I heard in the meat market: “Bill, this persecution is what I have for you this summer. Trust me. I want to teach you some things.”

Where was God? I felt so alone, so empty, so hungry, so depressed.

My Dark Night of the Soul

I didn’t understand it at the time, but I was experiencing my first “Dark Night of the Soul.”

God had withdrawn from me the felt sense of his presence. All I could do was cry out to God with David: “How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). I prayed and prayed, but I was not experiencing God’s blessings. The spiritual disciplines that used to bring me a feeling of God’s love, joy, and peace left me flat and empty. There seemed to be no spiritual light at the end of my dark tunnel.

After my three days were finished I left the monastery more desperate and dejected then when I had arrived. I hadn’t heard God’s voice for my future. I didn’t even like God at that point!

The Vision that Changed Everything

But the next day was one of the turning points in my life. I was in church singing, “How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news. Good news. Announcing peace, proclaiming news of happiness. Our God reigns! Our God reigns!”

Suddenly, God gave me a gift of grace: I had a vision. (Now you need to know that having a vision or special experience of God’s grace does not mean that you’re a better or more mature Christian than someone who doesn’t. If there’s any correlation it’d be the reverse: those who are less mature in their relationship with Christ may need extraordinary revelations while the more mature are fine with only God’s still, small voice.)

The Mountain I had to Climb

It all happened in a flash. In my mind’s eye I saw myself at the bottom of Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments. I had imagined this mountain many times because as a young man I used to imagine that as I read the Bible or prayed I was climbing a mountain to go into God’s presence.

Once again I wanted to climb to the top to meet with God, but for the first time in my life I felt unworthy and unable to climb it. I felt the same sense of shame and isolation that I felt in the meat market and in the monastery. But I was telling myself that I had to get up. I had to work at it. I had to try harder and do better.

Then my anxious, self-critical, and self-demanding thoughts were interrupted… I saw Jesus coming down the mountain! He was looking at me — as he had looked at Peter after Peter denied him — with eyes that saw right into my soul and knew all my sins and struggles, but he didn’t condemn me he had compassion for me! Tears were streaming down his cheeks and I knew they were for me.

You know how in a dream some things don’t make sense on the surface level? The vision God gave me was like that in the aspect that even though Jesus was circling down the mountain going all the way around it we never lost eye contact — he kept looking into my soul with eyes of compassion.

Jesus Picked Me Up

He stopped when he came to me and he picked me up and put me over his shoulders.  He started to carry me up the mountain — as if I was a sack of potatoes! Just like I used to carry my kids when they were little.

A crowd formed. People started to insult Jesus. They spit at him, yelled at him, and beat him.  And still he carried me up the mountain. I realized that Jesus Christ, the Holy One, the Son of God, was taking onto himself the persecution and pain that I had experienced. And he was paying the price for my failures and sins too.

As I hung over his shoulder looking over his back all I could see were his feet: “How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news!”

I was the Cross!

I suddenly realized that I was the cross on Jesus’ back. He carried me all the way to the top of the mountain, into the presence of God.

Grace. I experienced the grace of God in Christ and it set me free of all the pressure I’d been putting on myself to perform for God.

So that’s what the monk was trying to tell me!

More Soul Shepherding

Read “In the Dark Night Remember God” to learn what the Psalmist teaches us about going through a Dark Night of the Soul.

Thank you!

Bill & Kristi