“Mom, I got crucified today.” It was how he said it, with a certain satisfaction that did not match his statement. “Really?” I ask, still worrying for a moment if this was an attempt at a metaphor for a rough day on the playground. “I got the best part in the whole play – I got to play Jesus!” It’s the next part of his explanation that made me ponder. “I mean, I am the one who had to die, but it was worth it to be Jesus.”

I wonder if I forget sometimes that the part that I have been asked to play is the best part ever? Is the costly price of my cross that I have been chosen to play today of highest worth to me?

As a mother, what does it mean to joyfully and purposefully say, “I got crucified today,” or as Galatians 2:20 states, “I am crucified with Christ.” Emulating the death of Christ in the spiritual sense involves contemplating, meditating, and adoring the significance of the cross. It is with this spiritual focus that strength and clarity are found in the trenches where I would otherwise lose hope and purpose. This life in Christ is what equips me to mortify the predilection toward sin. It is in embracing the self-giving death of Christ that my sins are reduced to a yielded state akin to death.

The poignant paradox is that this death does not thwart my life. When you roll back the curtain my vocation to family life and motherhood enables me to deny myself and uproot fear and pride daily. In truth, this role has drawn me into my best “part in the whole play.” In dying to myself, I live in a full, authentic, truer understanding of my relationship to my personhood, my domestic realm, and the world at large.

“I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me” (Gal 2:19b-20).