Outside the gates of Paradise

The devil can’t stand to see anyone happy, and so he contrives by every possible means to spoil our joy. Wives and husbands torment each other. Parents and children antagonize each other. Employers and employees sabotage each other. And even most friends can’t stay friends for long. What’s wrong with us? And when the devil can’t get at us any other way, he even makes us a horror to ourselves!

But all this was foreseen, and we were warned, “a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.” Why must it be this way? How much love He has, that the Father sent His Son to us, to become a man like us, to feel the same pain of spoiled joy. He came to live among us, outside the gates of Paradise, and He died, leaving His holy body hanging on the tree, so that partaking of it as thieves, we could someday reenter Paradise, with Him.

Just as the peace He gives us is bestowed in the midst of battle, so is His joy bestowed in the midst of anguish. There is no higher way above, nor humbler way below, the way of the cross.

“If any man will be My disciple,

let him take up his cross, and follow Me.”