I’m going to be talking about the crosses in our lives, the difference between the crosses that the Lord gives us, which are necessary for our salvation and the crosses that we are creating ourselves, which are actually making our lives harder and creating distraction and using our resources of energy, time, attention to not be able to carry the crosses that the Lord gives us as well as he meant us to be able to.

In fact, they’re even blocking our grace. So today I want to talk to you about that. I think you’re going to get some real insight into how to make your life easier. And then I’m going to give you some tips on how you can make your life easier and what to do with those crosses that we are creating ourselves.

All right. This is a concept that we were talking about in our community recently, and it really hit home with a lot of women. So I hope that does the same thing for you. So, let’s begin with what I believe are the three crosses that exist in the world. There are three crosses, two of them come from the Lord, one is not from the Lord.

The two crosses that the Lord gives us are for two different reasons. One is for our own good, and one is for the good and salvation of others. So the ones that the Lord gives us for our own salvation are meant to purify us, to refine us, to draw us closer to him that are necessary for our own salvation.

And what I think is just so incredible  is that the crosses that you are specifically enduring are necessary for your salvation. And the crosses that I am enduring, which aren’t the same as yours, are necessary for my salvation. 

And if we can start to look at also our loved ones and the things that we worry about with them, whether they’re going through an illness, a divorce, struggling in school, a same sex attraction, whatever the crosses are that your loved ones are going through are necessary for their salvation.

I just think that’s so incredible because even if I look back, At the painful marriage that I really had my husband, I went through an emotionally abusive marriage and we’ve come out and healed on the other side. 

But how that was so necessary for  me, I’ll only speak for myself to come to know that I was putting my husband as a God before the Lord, that my emotional wellbeing and can still be dependent on the well being of my husband.

And I still struggle with that cross of making his well being and his happiness a mini god. Like, I’ll be okay as long as he’s okay. And I love that. I love that that’s one of my crosses is having a husband who probably, has his own struggles. And then I watch it and then I see how I’m allowing that to affect me.

And not a real wholly supportive way, but as a, Oh, I’m so scared. If he’s not okay, I won’t be okay. Which is a cross that I’m creating myself. And you’ll be able to see that as I describe this more. So just know that the crosses that the Lord gives you specifically for you are for your own salvation and for everyone else. It’s for their own salvation.  

I look at people who might be going through chronic illnesses and I have such a heart for them. And I just realized, gosh, That’s their cross for them to get closer to the Lord, because I believe that in the crosses that the Lord gives us is hidden inside the ability to unlock certain virtues, the ability to unlock certain treasures that will be given.

When we learn to carry that cross united with the Lord in the way that the Lord would carry it. So for example, I gave you the cross that I carry. Of my husband just being who he is and experiencing life. And I watch him experience life. Let’s just say that is my cross, is being with a human who has human experiences.

And my goal is to carry that, if you will, like a supportive wife. With grace. With being supportive. But not letting that determine my own wellbeing. that’s the cross that I’m creating myself. I hope we’re clear on the first type of cross, which is the cross that’s for our own good.

The second type, I believe, is maybe reserved for super holy people,  maybe victim souls. And these are the crosses and the sufferings that are graced to souls who are able to carry the gift of suffering so that they can offer. That’s suffering to save someone else’s souls. And I think we can, do this on our own, where we offer a sacrifice that the Lord has called us to offer.

And this is where it is a cross that the Lord. is offering to us, is calling us to do, has put that desire in our heart and we offer that for someone else. So I would say that’s another sort of cross redeeming someone else, offering it for their healing, offering it for their salvation, offering it for the souls in purgatory for many other reasons. And it is suffering.

It is a cross. And then there’s cross number three and the third cross It’s not from the Lord. It’s not of God. It’s a cross that we in our humanness are creating. And I say it’s a cross because it is suffering. It’s adding heaviness and burden to our lives. It’s unnecessary. We do not get grace to carry these crosses.

We do not get supernatural strength to carry these crosses. The Lord cannot help us carry these crosses because we were never meant to carry them. And the second thing about these crosses is that they distract us from going to the Lord to carry the crosses that he asked us to carry. 

And created for us that are necessary for our salvation. And they deplete our resources, the deplete energy, they deplete our attention because we’re spinning out and creating these crosses, making things heavier than they need to be. All right. So how do you know the difference? The difference is the crosses from the Lord are things that you cannot control. It’s that simple. 

The crosses from the Lord are things that you cannot control. That we create are things that we can control. But I want to put a little asterisk next to this. I want to talk about all world wars as an example. Can you control that? No. Is that the cross that was created for you to carry? I don’t know. How are you carrying it? Has the Lord called you to be? Some activist, has the Lord called you to, do something that would benefit the victims of that war?

Or are you just spinning out and worrying about the war? Worry, worry, worry, worry about human events, worry, worry, worry. I just want you guys to know that you have to put an asterisk next to things you cannot control. Because I want to talk to you about crosses that the Lord created for you that are necessary for your salvation.

And if you want to spin out and worry about all the things that you cannot control, that are not crosses that were necessarily given to you for your salvation, and all you’re doing is worrying and worrying and worrying and worrying and worrying about them, and they weren’t your crosses.  Like I said, it’s distracting you from the crosses the Lord really gave to you.

We can look at all the horrible things that are happening in the world and believe that we’re supposed to do something about them. But that belief probably doesn’t bring you closer to the Lord. It just spins you out in worry. It distracts you and is depleting your resources of energy, attention, time.

And so I’m even asking you to discern and get even clearer on what crosses the Lord has given you that are necessary for your salvation, that he can then provide you the supernatural grace to carry. Remember, those crosses that are meant just for you, are meant to purify you, are meant to refine you, to bring you closer to Him, and are necessary for your salvation.

And you can get pretty clear on what those are. They probably happen in your own four walls. They probably happen in your family. He’s not asking us to carry the world, my friends. He’s just not. And if he asks you and puts on your heart to take some step toward.

Helping other humans in need that are across the world or far away You will know because you will put it on your heart and it will feel like conviction. It will feel like Usefulness, it will feel very peaceful It won’t feel like you’re spinning out and worrying and just talking about all the troubles in the world It’s just a depletion of your resources And we’re human guys we only have finite resources.

The Lord will not give us grace to carry the crosses we’re creating ourselves. The crosses that he creates for us, we don’t have to worry about having the strength and grace to do that. He gives us supernatural grace for that.

So again, to get really clear on the difference between the crosses that we’re creating and the crosses That the Lord gave us. Just look at the hands you’re dealt, the cards you’re dealt. What is in your life that you cannot control? Let’s start with just in your life, not on the news, turn off the news friends. The crosses that you are creating are the thoughts that you have about those facts, those facts in your life.

There’s four ways that I see us making our own crosses. And there might be more, but let’s just go with me here. The crosses that we’re creating ourselves, the first one is resistance. Believing that whatever that fact is in our life, shouldn’t be in our life, shouldn’t be that way. Just resisting it.

Believing that we know better than the Lord. Remember I told you that, especially for our loved ones, they’re going to have their own crosses, and those crosses have been given to them by the Lord for their own salvation. We can’t believe that just because it looks bad, and we see them suffer, and they have a human experience, that it’s actually hurting them. They’re having a human experience. 

But this is necessary for their salvation. Even thinking this is necessary for their salvation, salvation probably feels a lot better than resisting it. So we see the facts of life, we see hard things, and we think it shouldn’t be that way. And the only reason why we think it shouldn’t be that way is because we probably see human suffering. And our brains believe that human suffering is a bad thing. That it’s not safe. 

But when we shine the light of the Lord’s truth on that, we can see a supernatural truth and understanding that nothing in God’s world, absolutely nothing in God’s world happens by mistake. Nothing. So by believing it shouldn’t be that way, it’s one of the crosses that we’re creating ourselves. 

The second one is spinning out and catastrophizing. And what that means is, we see something happen, someone have an illness, and we just go to the worst case scenario. This happens so easily, especially because we have human brains. 

One thing happens, a child brings home an F on a test and we think, oh my gosh, they’re going to fail the class. That’s just one example. Catastrophizing in, we get a bad review at work, oh my gosh, I’m going to be fired. Catastrophizing. Spinning out in the worst case scenario. Someone is diagnosed with M. S.

Oh my gosh, tomorrow they’re going to be in a wheelchair. They won’t be able to walk their daughter down the aisle. Just spinning out in the worst case scenario. I want you to know that that is a very common thing for a human brain to do. 

So we can let our brains freak out, especially when we get bad news, but we know there is a point where it is no longer helpful or useful, or even a kind thing to just let our brains spin out in worst case scenario, it’s distracting us from the real cross.

The real cross. Is having a child with a diagnosis. The Real Cross is dealing with your feelings as a parent of a child with a diagnosis. The Real Cross is managing and supporting your child. The Real Cross is managing their health care. When we spin out in catastrophizing We are distracted by what is needed now, and the Lord needs us to stay present now to the real cross, to what has really been given to us.

He wants us to walk so closely with Him now in this situation to not be distracted, to not deplete our resources that are needed now in the cross that He’s given us. This is catastrophizing, and indulging in catastrophizing is the second way the third way, you guys, is kind of the opposite of catastrophizing the future, it is spinning out in memories.

Spinning out in memories. Okay, so, this is an example of, say you have, you have a tragedy. in your family member. Let’s say you have a family member who is diagnosed with lung cancer.

And you spin out in all the ways that that family member has not been taking care of their health and they were a smoker and you talked to them 20 years ago about quitting smoking and they never quit and then they quit for a little bit and then they were closet smoking and then you have been trying to help them eat healthier and they don’t want to eat healthier and now you see like I told them they shouldn’t have been doing this.

I saw this with this was not a client of mine but recently at  an example of this was at a dinner party where a woman was telling me that her mom died of esophageal cancer. And then she went into how she had told her mom years ago that you shouldn’t be drinking out of plastic water bottles and reusing them.

And the point of the story is, is I recognize that this woman really believed that had her mom not drank out of plastic water bottles and frozen them and reused them over and over and over and had taken her daughter’s advice, she would not have had esophageal cancer.

I mean, that might be true. That might be true. But the cross was, is that this woman’s mother died, which is painful. And yet, she’s another cross, if you will, of believing that her mom died from esophageal cancer, and it could have been prevented from all these reasons, and she told me much more about these water bottles than she did about feeling sad about her mom’s loss.

Which is really the real cross. And I don’t think that any of these, these are just very human ways that we create our own crosses through resistance, spinning out and catastrophizing, or reliving memories and old stories over and over and over.

They’re very human things, but I want you guys to just see how they’re making your lives so much harder, instead of just dealing with the cross. The cross is, I miss my mom. The crosses, I’m really scared about my kid’s diagnosis. 

The crosses, it hurts me to see my husband in a bad mood. I’m afraid that he’s going to blow up.

Those are the crosses that the Lord wants us to go to him and talk about.  Go to him.

I’m going to talk to you a little bit more about that. And what we do with the real crosses or the crosses that we’re creating ourselves. But I did say that there are four ways that we’re making our lives harder and creating our own crosses. 

And this is what is mostly related to you. My friend who finds herself stuck and battling with her weight is that when we’re in resistance, when we’re spinning out and catastrophizing, when we’re reliving memories.

When we’re creating our own crosses, it’s too much. It becomes too much for our lives to bear. And because we don’t have the grace to carry them, we start to carry them with our own human strength. And we typically don’t have the strength to carry them. And we turn to other methods to help us cope with life.

And if you’re like me, that other method was food. Food helped me survive a lot. Food helped me get through the heaviness of life. Heck, food even made the good things in life even better. But I had found that food was what I went to to make life as I thought it should be, to help me endure life, to cope with life.

And so when we buffer, which means we’re creating distance between ourselves and that horrible feeling with food, we’re just now compounding the problems. So we have the Lord’s cross that he gave us, but instead of walking with him as closely as he wants so that we can access his supernatural strength in grace, we have now created crosses of our own that we can only carry with human strength.

And because it becomes too much for us, we start to use other methods to cope because we can’t access the Lord’s strength. So we start using food and then our health starts to go down and our mental wellbeing goes down. We see what we’re doing and we feel guilt and we feel shame. We see our bodies, we feel guilt and we feel shame and it just compounds and compounds and compounds.

And I don’t say that for you to feel guilty. I say that for you to be able to recognize it’s optional and no one’s told you that. No one’s told you that. And so you can feel very buried under this food and weight struggle and there’s no way out.

But I promise you the Lord is throwing you a life rest, a life vest. He’s throwing you a rope. He is always there for you. And what’s so cool, you guys, is even if you see a cross that you’ve created yourself, you can say, Lord, can you help me with this? And he’s like, okay, let’s get out of that.

I want you to know the weight loss with the Holy Spirit program is just that. It is a very simple way that you can start. To feel unburied and unburdened and feel hope and be able to access the Lord’s strength. I don’t want you to ever think that you created your food and weight struggles. I just want you to know that it is one of those things that the Lord does allow.

I’ll tell you one of the greatest crosses he ever gave me was my food and weight struggles. He allowed that to happen. Did I create it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ll tell you I needed it. I didn’t know a different way. And now that I’ve found freedom through him, I can say that’s possible. I can show you how it’s possible.

I have a much bigger, brighter, more beautiful, richer life and greater connection and friendship with the Lord than I could have ever had. Had I not had my food and weight struggles. Just so grateful for it. 

And that’s how I know that what he gives in our lives is meant to draw us closer to him to refine us and can be used for our salvation. So let’s look at the facts of your life. These are facts. Let’s don’t talk about where they came from. We’re just talking about facts. Let’s don’t say I created it myself or I didn’t.

The facts of your life are the facts. The facts of your life are the crosses that you currently have. What you choose to think of them is your choice. And so now what you can do to lighten your life, to remove the Optional crosses is to just decide how you want to think about them. This is a huge part of our Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit program.

It’s to look at our facts of life. And it can be, I am 100 pounds overweight. Great! That’s a fact. How do you want to feel about that? How do you want to feel about that? You get to decide. You can try on things like, I’m willing to learn new ways to lose weight. If I never lose this 100 pounds, The Lord loves me. It’s important for me to be healthy. I know the Lord wants health for me.

I’m a hundred pounds heavier than my healthy weight and that’s okay. Isn’t that a beautiful thought? I’m a hundred pounds healthier than my healthy weight and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean I have to stay there, but it sure feels a lot better than the criticism and the condemning and the judging.

So you get to think on purpose and just decide what you want to think about that. What do you want to think about that fact of your life? How can you align your thoughts with the Lord? You get to decide what you’re making it mean.

And one thing that will be really helpful for you is this whole concept of self compassion. I want you to imagine that a friend is going through a hard time. I want you to imagine that a friend is 100 pounds overweight and she’s talking to you. First of all,  you would see that she’s hurting.

And the second thing is you would support her and encourage her.

That’s two things. That’s what you get to do for yourself. That’s what self compassion is. Self compassion is just that. Recognizing that you’re having some hard feelings, that there’s a fact in your life, and that the feelings that you have about it The true feelings, not spinning out and catastrophizing, not resistance, not reliving memories, but the true feelings.

Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s worry, maybe it’s not feeling good enough, maybe it’s feeling unloved, maybe it’s lonely, but self compassion is first recognizing that you have a feeling, a feeling inside your human body. It’s uncomfortable. And the second thing is meeting you where you are and being supportive and safe.

And what I mean by supportive and safe is you don’t have to dismiss that you have that feeling. You don’t have to say, Oh, you’re not scared. It’ll all be okay. Offer it up. You don’t have to dismiss it. Just allowing yourself to feel it and be safe and being safe means emotionally safe and physically safe.

So showing your body that you are safe to experience that feeling. I did a podcast on how to, what was it like, how to experience feelings without overeating. It was something like that.  I’ll link it in the description, but it’s about how to have emotion without eating. And it goes through how you can just lean into that emotion.

But noticing that you’re having an uncomfortable feeling, detecting it, and then being supportive, allowing yourself to be not only emotionally, physically safe, but emotionally safe. And what I mean by emotionally safe is by not criticizing and condemning yourself for having the emotion, being judgment free.

In the case of our friend who might be a hundred pounds overweight, by not criticizing or condemning yourself by the behaviors that you see yourself do  that are leading you to be overweight. Trust me, if you felt like you had an option, if you thought there was a different way to deal with life, you wouldn’t be overeating.

Hearing me say that. Your brain’s probably like, well, of course I have another option. Yes, of course you have another option, because you’re not in the moment. But in the moment, your brain was just seeking safety. Of course you were overeating. It helped you cope with life. It was survival. It doesn’t mean you ever have to do it again, but let’s just be compassionate for that woman in that brain who felt like she really needed that.

There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not broken. You just haven’t known a different way. And now that you’re hearing this podcast, you do. Isn’t that lovely? Isn’t the Lord so faithful? He always brings what you pray for. And you’ve probably been praying for a really long time. 

So if you want to understand more of self compassion, which is providing yourself with support and love, kindness and care, treating yourself the way the Lord would, it’s a skill.

You won’t know how to do it at first, but you can learn it. There’s a wonderful website called SelfCare.com. Kristin Neff,  Kristin with a K-R-I-S-T-I-N, and then her last name is Neff, N-E-F-F. SelfCompassion.com just talks about what self compassion is. She’s got beautiful resources on her website.

She leads you through different exercises. It’s just so fantastic, and I believe that this is the way the Lord expects us to carry our crosses with Him, with resources that bring His love to us. So as we go through  Lent. Let our prayer be to remove all in me that opposes you, Lord. All in me that opposes you. I hope this podcast has been helpful. And I hope that you can trust the Lord. To reveal to you what the facts are in your life. 

The crosses that are needed for your salvation. To purify you, to refine you, to bring you closer to Him. That are necessary to teach you what He wants you to know, to reveal those lessons. And guess what guys? The longer it takes us to learn those lessons, I think sometimes the more we’ll just have that cross and then we can transfer into those crosses that he gives us that are for the good of others.

The suffering that we endure, that he’s giving us supernatural grace to accept for the salvation of other souls. And those are those people that I truly believe you see that are in like chronic illness and chronic pain and they have so much joy. It’s like they have learned what they need to learn through their cross, and now their suffering is being offered for the salvation of others.

And maybe the Lord is continuing to purify and refine them through their suffering. It’s just amazing to me, the example of people who have what seem like, So much human hardship and they have so much joy and that joy comes from walking so closely with the Lord. 

So let’s spend our energy and our resources on walking so closely with the Lord and removing all in ourselves that oppose him, which are the thoughts that are not aligned with him about our crosses and our suffering.

We are making it harder. I am making my life harder when I spin out. And resistance, believing it shouldn’t be this way, catastrophizing, going to the worst case scenario, or reliving the memories, or blame. And then by turning to substances to buffer. Over caffeinating, over scrolling, over eating, over drinking, all the overrings.

This podcast is meant to bring a new concept to your awareness. This podcast is meant to allow you to search what it is the Lord wanted to reveal to you through hearing this. That’s all. That’s all. There should be no shame. There should be no guilt. You guys, I see myself fall into humanness and making my life harder than it needs to be often.

But what’s so cool is that once you know this concept, you can pull yourself out of it even quicker and say, Oh, I’m making my life harder. I don’t need to believe that, that untruth. 

This skill, this is a skill as you know, and if you want to be surrounded by other Catholic women who are learning skills like this, being able to walk closer with the Lord, being able to walk so closely with the Lord to carry their crosses and to be free of their food and weight struggles, go to weightlosswithaholyspirit.com and see how you can get started today.

All right, everybody have a blessed day.