onlooker or companion

For forty days, we follow Christ to His cross.  Are we going to follow as onlookers, or are we going to be real companions to Christ?  This is the question we should all ask ourselves. ~Mother Mary Joseph Rogers


What an incredible, and uncomfortable, question!  Am I content just to watch it all from a distance and therefore remain basically unaffected by the season once again?  Or am I willing to really enter into it?  Am I going to ask Jesus to give me the courage and the strength and the grace to be a true companion to him on this journey through death to new life?  And if so, how?


So far this season, Lord Jesus, I must confess that I have been merely an onlooker.  Allow me, for the rest of the season, to be a companion.  But I do not have the strength or the courage to do it on my own, so you will have to help me.   It will have to be you, Lord Jesus, you, Holy Spirit, doing it in me.  Lord, have mercy!