Yesterday we learned that through the examination of consciousness, we can heighten our awareness of God’s blessings in our lives and become more grateful so that we can more easily find God in all things. But how can we be grateful if we find no blessings from God in our lives, but only pain and suffering? How can we find God in all things in such a life? First, let's challenge our understanding of the theme of this retreat, "Finding God in All Things". Have we romanticized the idea of "finding God in all things"? This means that in our impression, is God only present in things good and beautiful? So, is God present in pain, suffering, even persecution and sin? We need to understand that if God was only present in truth, goodness and beauty, the Son of God would not choose to be born as a human being, live in a world full of ugliness and evil, and choose to live and walk with people. While God cannot tolerate the sinfulness of human nature, He not only did not abandon or flee from us sinners, but willingly took on human nature and lived amidst sinfulness. We need to understand that it is the most unimaginable thing for God to do, for He is holy and perfect, the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty. But not only did He willingly live among sinful people, He even took on our sins and bore their consequences for us! As St. Paul proclaimed in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 5, Verse 21: "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Corinthians 5:21) Since God is willing to become sin for us, to become our sacrificial lamb, does He have any reason not to be present in our pain, suffering, trauma, humiliation, as well as all the ugliness, evil, natural or man-made disasters in the world? On this Good Friday, let us learn what it means to "carry the cross". First of all, we need to know that the so-called "crucifixion" was a capital punishment specifically designed by the Roman Empire to punish rebels, intended to make those criminals experience the most painful, cruel, excruciating, and torturous death possible. In addition to the process of dying on the cross, they also subjected the criminals to the most humiliating and helpless mental torment. The cruel requirement of forcing the criminals to "carry the cross" was to make those convicted of rebellion experience the defeat of being completely conquered, that the very last thing they were made to do before being nailed to the cross was to carry the instrument of their own death along a rugged path of suffering to the place of execution. This was done to demonstrate their complete and absolute obedience to the ruling authority. Jesus knew the torture He was about to endure was a form of punishment that was absolutely horrifying to the people under the rule of the Roman Empire, and it was certainly the most cruel means of governance that anyone had witnessed. Yet it was the will of the Heavenly Father that His only begotten Son should bear this torture innocently to pay for the sins of all of us! Jesus demonstrated complete and absolute submission to the will of the Father with the spirit of obedience demanded by this form of torture. This spirit of surrender is a reflection and hallmark of Jesus' entire life, and it is also through this complete obedience that He reversed the rebellion of our original ancestors against the Father. So when Jesus asks us, His followers, to deny ourselves and take up our cross daily to follow Him (Luke 9:23), He is asking us to learn from Him, to submit to the will of the Father. Therefore, "following Christ" means giving up our own desires, and instead, following the better arrangements made by the Father for us through faithfulness and imitation of Jesus. The greatest difference between us and the criminals sentenced to crucifixion is that they were coerced, while we can make choices and responses through the free will given to us by God. When we make a heart