Step 1: Find a cross. Notice that it is made up of a vertical beam and a horizontal one. Meditate on one beam at a time. Let the vertical beam represent your relationship with God. Let the horizontal beam represent your relationship with the world (family, friends, God’s creation)

Step 2: Read John 3:1-17

Step 3: Read the below meditation. What sentences are vertical relationships with God? What sentences are horizontal relationships with God’s creation?

When we encounter Christ as Nicodemus did, we are offered an invitation to deepen our relationship with Christ. What at first may start out as a surface level relationship can be extended out deeper and wider within us as we learn how to trust and obey God. With the deepening of the relationship, greater healing and wider faith is extended from our hearts to having a heart for others. For God so loved the world… God loves the world because it is God’s creation. Because we are part of creation, this must mean that God loves us, and when we can acknowledge that we are not the center of the universe, the love God has for His creation can be easily found within each one of us. If this is the case, we are called to love as God loves us. This may seem simple enough at first, but if we look at the world within us and around us, it is anything but simple. For starters, when we enter into relationship with God, we are inviting God into all aspects of ourselves –those parts we acknowledge and are proud of as well as those parts we dismiss and are ashamed or fearful of. God penetrates our hearts and souls so deep that it takes our senses, our faculties, and our brains a very long time to even register God’s healing presence. What can be experienced as ambiguous and partial on our end is made whole in Christ. In other words, we don’t see the whole picture, but only a part of the puzzle. It takes faith to trust and obey God wherever he may be leading our bodies and souls. Mystics call this experience of God a deep knowing that is very different from knowledge. Put simply, it’s a difference in knowing God rather than knowing about God. When this type of knowing is experienced, God gets to view the world through us, and visa-versa. Everything has changed in these moments; yet everything is the same. It’s as if a shift has happened in our very perspective, and God has settled in nicely to a comfortable warm heart. This was the deeper invitation Jesus was extending to Nicodemus. Nicodemus was impressed with the knowledge of God represented in the signs Jesus was performing; however, his spirituality was arrested and he could not move past the signs. He stayed in the flesh instead of moving deeper into God’s Spirit.

Let this be a lesson to us, and the lesson is this: God is constantly calling us into deeper ways of knowing and being in relationship with Him. Why not let go, give in, and say, ‘Yes.’

Step 4: Call to mind the cross in Step 1. What do you believe your default beam to be – the Vertical or Horizontal one? Is your relationship with Christ where it needs to be (regular prayer, worship, accountability group/mentor(s)) represented by the Vertical Beam? Is your relationship with the world where it needs to be (you, your family, your society – God’s creation is taken care of in your neck of the woods) represented by the Horizontal Beam?

Step 5: This Lent, work on the beam that is not your default one. Notice when the two beams are joined a cross is made, and a center formed. Crucify your self/ego on the cross. What remains is only Christ in the center of your life calling you into further relationship with him and his creation.