Open Arms at the Crossroads

Summer returns, and the trails fill up. Backpack on, map in hand, many will pass by those small stone markers standing in the hollow of our countryside this season. A wayside cross. A stone crucifix, sometimes eaten by lichen, passed without a second glance.

On the hiking map, it is just a dot. A tiny symbol lost in the expanse of forests and contour lines, one landmark among a hundred others. You glance at it and move on.

And yet this little dot is no ordinary one. It marks a crossing — the precise spot where paths part ways, where a decision must be made. Unremarkable on paper, crucial on the ground. And the word crucial, even in English, carries the cross within it.

Once, this wayside cross served a purpose. It told horse-drawn carts that here, two roads met. Today, no cart stops there anymore.

And yet it is still standing.

You walk. You reach this crossroads. And like every traveller before a fork in the road, you ask the one question burning inside you: which way? Which road? You look for an arrow, a sign, something that might finally tell you which direction to take.

You look up at the cross. You wait for it to show you the way.

And it is not arrows you find.

It is open arms.

The crossroads asked you a question about the road. The cross answers you with an embrace. You came looking for a direction — you stumble upon Someone who was waiting for you.

And what these arms say to you, my friend, is not: "here is where you should have gone." It is not a reproach for all the roads you have already missed. It is simpler, and infinitely greater: come as you are, I love you.

Not "come when you have found the right road." Not "come when you have fixed yourself." Come. Now. Battered, tired, perhaps lost. The welcome asks nothing of you first. It receives you first.

Look carefully at that cross. Two beams. One might see the shape of an intersection — the horizontal of roads, the vertical of heaven. But beneath these open arms, everything shifts.

The horizontal is no longer the roads of the crossroads. It is two arms opening wide to receive you whole. And the vertical no longer points to a direction to follow: it connects heaven to you, here, in the middle of your ordinary walk.

The cross is not a wall thrown across your path. It is a door. Better still: it is a standing presence that waited for you where you least expected it.

This is how God comes. Not confined to some distant sanctuary one must earn the right to enter. He plants himself on your everyday path, at the most ordinary crossroads of an ordinary life. You do not labor your way up to him. He stands in your road. And there he is, even marked on the maps, visible from a distance — as if welcome, across the vast expanse of your journey, had been waiting for you at one precise point. A point that seems secondary, and yet decides everything.

You will set off again, of course. The crossroads is still there, the roads too, and one must be chosen.

But you will choose differently now.

You will no longer walk driven by the fear of taking the wrong road, but carried by the rest of having been welcomed. The right direction does not come from anxiety. It comes from the embrace. We choose well when we have first been loved.