What happens when you behead a dandelion in full orb?

Ann Voskamp observes,

somewhere along the line we just wanted to become people of inoffensive Love — not people of the offensive Cross?

...Yeah, just go ahead and ask the 21 Coptic Christians who knelt before ISIS, who are waiting to be beheaded, for their heads to literally roll because they are “people of the Cross” — and yeah, the Cross may not make you friends with ISIS or the self-help gurus or any of the feel-good channels … or the people down the street, across the lunch aisle or across the office.

...The Cross looks messy, it looks bloody, it looks ugly — and the Cross has been shamefully used like a sledge-hammer by the religious instead of like a life-line unashamedly held out by the rescued.

God is Love and God is the essence of Love and He chose that the essential expression of Love is the Cross.

...Love is about ferocious suffering and gracious sacrifice and the root of Love is the foundation of the Cross and the dictionary that defines Love is a Cross and Love has no language, no meaning, no interpretation without the Cross.

Any kind of love that lacks the iron of the Cross in it, is anemic love.

It won’t make you flourish, it won’t let you really live. It isn’t fully healthy Love.

Love without a Cross has no backbone.

Love without a Cross can’t stand — because it’s only about feel-good and not about being made new.

People are dying for the faith we take for granted, that we take and hide under a bushel, that we take and paint vanilla — so we don’t get persecuted.

Are we people who humbly take up the Cross and take our faith seriously — or people who seriously take and hide our faith under a humble bushel?

...just because something may not be politically correct, doesn’t mean it’s not correct: While Political Correctness may say, “Follow Me and maybe we’ll find many doors that lead to God,” Jesus humbly reaches out, “I hung on the Cross and I am the door — so follow Me.”

...once when I was a little girl, I tried to behead a dandelion in full orb and if you behead a dandelion in full head —

you send a thousand more bravely out on the wind.

Read more here and see names and photos of the martyrs.