My husband and I traveled home from the Rio Grande Valley yesterday and I noticed a small, white cross on each side of the road. I’d seen them a few weeks ago when we’d been to Rockport but not paid attention to what they honestly stood for: The horrible price those parents paid. The devastation that moment of truth brought; the never-ending loss.

Like He so often does, God reminded me of a greater truth from that simple symbolism: The horrible price Father God paid as His only so-very-well-beloved Son died on the cross. This death wasn’t a terrible shock to this Parent as it had been to those, for He planned it from before the world was formed. For that moment when Father had to turn His face from His Son, however, it must have been horrible. Only God’s great love for you and me could have forced such tremendous pain.

This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. 17 God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. 18 Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him. (John 3:16-18 from The Message Bible).