It may be the mountain of laundry you face every day or your child’s tuition bill.

It could take the form of the textbooks you use to teach your students, the tools you wield at the construction site, the computer that produces the reports and graphics that keep your business humming along.

For some, it’s the wheelchair required to manoeuvre through life or the medicine needed to even have a life.

Yours may be the soup you make and serve at the local soup kitchen or the ball you use to coach a team of excited six- and seven-year-olds.

Some of the most beautiful ones are the ear that is always ready to listen to a soul in crisis, the shoulder always available for the grieving to cry on, the smile that readily comforts, the heart that never fails to break with another’s.

Believe it or not, spouses are sometimes big ones for one another; good friends readily accept each other as one.

Sometimes the most challenging and shattering experiences later become extraordinary ones. What we learn from them can later be the source of transformative wisdom and understanding for ourselves and others.

They are all crosses — crosses we take up in the spirit of Jesus.

We tend to think of crosses as burdens, things — and people! — that demand so much energy and time from us. We see our sufferings and our brokenness as “crosses” that condemn us to incomplete and unfulfilled lives of sadness and despair. Most days we want to lay those crosses aside and never pick them up again. But our real crosses — the crosses God places on our shoulders and Christ bears with us — can become sources of hope, of joy, of discovery, of life, of resurrection. They are not the extent of our lives but the means to living lives to the fullest, the vehicles for discovering the meaning and purpose of this journey God has set us on.

Today’s feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross celebrates several events in the development of the early Christian movement, including Empress Helena’s discovery of Jesus’ cross in Jerusalem between the years 326 and 328 AD and the dedication of churches built by her son Emperor Constantine at the sites of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. While Good Friday focuses on the passion of Jesus, today’s feast challenges us to consider the cross itself: the instrument that can be the means to new life. Clearly, our crosses pale in the shadow of Christ’s but, as the wood of his cross becomes the tree of Easter life, our crosses, when taken up in his spirit of humility and hope, can be the first light of Easter for ourselves and others.