Take Up Your Cross and What?

As long as I have been a Christian I have been in discussions about, "Take up your cross and follow me."  The other night it came up again, but this time I had a different thought about how to interpret it.
Every other discussion I have participated in seemed to agree that it implied "your burden."  I would have a picture in my mind of Jesus struggling down the road with his cross across his back, and we were to take up our burden and carry it as Jesus carried his.  But this time I began to think, what was the cross to Jesus besides the physical object he was forced to carry?  And I came up with this: the cross was the means by which Jesus accomplished God's will for his life.  The burden Jesus carried to the cross was the sins of the world and only by dying on the cross could he accomplish his ultimate task.  So, how does this relate to us?

Our cross must be the means by which God will accomplish his will for our lives.  Perhaps the burden then is to discover what God's will is and how it is we are to accomplish it.  Certainly we can agree that God's general will is that we come to know him as Lord and Savior and to share him with others.  Outside of that, we can pretty well do what we want.  But each of us still wrestles with the specific thing God would have us do to accomplish his will in this world.  In my case, it seems that using my skill as an entertainer is the means by which I am pursuing God's will for my life.  What about you?  Take some time to pray and consider your cross.  When we each discover our cross, the means through which God will use us, it is then easier to take it up and bear it for him.