I was in a meeting with my supervisor last week, moving steadily through a list of agenda items.

Reflect on five year celebration. Check. Discuss plans for upcoming program review. Check. Share dismay at strategic planning event conflicting with Good Friday. Check. Sort of.

My intentions were clear. I wanted to make a simple statement about how we sometimes unknowingly compromise the strength of our shared community when we force individuals to choose between the community and their personal values (reflecting my recent decision to take off Good Friday for religious observance rather than participate in a university-wide day of planning with a visiting consultant). What I instead poured out was a tearful, strained set of sentences that included one gem hidden in the middle: “I am at a crossroads,” I said.

I meant this phrase in all the ways we know it to be used–I have a dilemma in front of me. I have decisions to make. One of these decisions was, of course, about the day itself. Others are bigger, more substantive “Who am I? How am I living my purpose?” decisions. But as I thought later about this particular phrase, I realized I was also talking in an unconscious code about the meaning of Good Friday for me.

I am American Baptist, and we “low-church” Protestants are known by our “high-church” siblings for skipping from the parade of Palm Sunday right to the resurrection of Easter. I will admit to being uneasy when I see the form of Jesus hanging on the cross when attending worship with Roman Catholic friends, and it has been years since I have worn one of the cross necklaces that featured prominently in my adolescence. The cross has been a symbol of oppression in some instances, and I have willingly set the symbol aside to let the greater love that is my theology shine through unencumbered.

It was clear from my unexpected tears and the “at a crossroads” I uttered that this “all about the cross” day has taken on great personal meaning for me, despite how I might appear to the world at large. The images that will accompany me this Friday as I pause to reflect and take an honest accounting of where I stand in my life have little to do with the cross as a public symbol that both attracts and repels. Rather, they are my own journey through and to the crossoads.

In high school I attended a statewide youth conference with summer camp friends. Those were raw, desperate years when the external illusion of perfect grades, big future plans, and a bright smile masked deep, inner pain. As well-known speaker Tony Campolo preached one evening about the image of Jesus on the cross, and the ways our self-injury (in its many forms) is participation in nailing Jesus on that cross, I had a mystical experience….a miraculous experience. I was healed of an obsessive behavior I had feared might be my undoing. The picture of Jesus’ anguish led me not to guilt or shame, but to a sense of my value and worth. The crossroads between self-loathing and self-love.

My mother died when I was a junior in college, and resuming my life by completing my senior year was nearly as difficult as staying present to her in her dying. I clung to the attention of women faculty and staff, my new “other mothers,” and I was more likely to be found having tea with one of these wise mentors than sharing a drink with a classmate. One evening I attended an art exhibit by Sister Helen David Brancato, a Philadelphia area nun, simply to be near an English professor who was particularly generous in greeting my pain with Emily Dickinson poetry. I received an unexpected gift in Sister Helen David’s print “It Was the Women Who Stayed,” depicting the women who remained with Jesus unto death, and the women across the ages whose capacity to stay present to the world’s suffering provide a new measure of love. The crossroads between an emotional death to the reality of my situation and the dignity of showing up for what hurts.

I grew up attending Pathfinder Lodge, an American Baptist camp on the shores of Lake Otsego in Cooperstown, NY. My parents met while working at Pathfinder, and I was privileged to meet my best friend and husband there as well. We married in Pathfinder’s chapel, our commitment sealed beside the cross in the image above. I once wrote an essay about this chapel and its cross in which I declared, “I will never be a cloud,” daring to imagine that as a person of faith I would find a way to be a non-conformist and resist the relentless push of the wind. As our chaplain friend and mentor married us, he asked us whether we wished to create a life that is square with the world or square with the universe. The crossroads between values that resonate on the surface and those that go plunging down into the depths.

There are other memories that have flooded back with the crossroads above. I listened earlier today to Ray Boltz’s song “Watch the Lamb,” the story of the crucifixion from the man ordered to carry Jesus’ cross on his behalf. The song is all the more significant since Boltz came out as a gay man, as too often LGBTQ Christians have been forced by the church to carry our shared cross of sexual unease and uncertainty. The crosses that dot highways always seem to symbolize a life cut abruptly short, and when I pass one, I squeeze my eyes shut with a prayer for the mother who planted that cross in the ground. Mingled with grief is the sense that this life will be remembered; this one’s presence extends far beyond the stake that was planted to mark it.

A year ago I was in a course on Jewish Spirituality, and I listened attentively as my faculty mentor and friend described his orientation toward Jerusalem, and his feeling of solidarity with Muslims who turn toward Mecca for prayer. For both groups, their spiritual center is a geographical center. He asked rhetorically where the center is for Christians, and I instantly thought, “At the intersection of the cross.”

The cross is a symbol that has, at times, represented a choice–an either/or between two distinct possibilities. At the intersection, however, there is the possibility of both/and. Loss mingled with life. The reality of this world in relationship with the energy of something more. Room for my stories, and, yes, room for yours, too. What do you see when you arrive at a crossroads?