What was the name of that man who helped Jesus lift the cross?

Mark 15:21 gives us the answer:

(NIV) “A certain main from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross.”

Can we imagine what a privilege it was for him to carry our Redeemer’s cross? Would you or I have done this? We would like to share with you a wonderful comment from one of our devotions book:

And as they led Him away, they laid hold upon one Simon,…and on him they laid the cross, that he might bear it after Jesus. (Luke 23:26)
WE have often wondered, where were Peter and John and James that they did not see the Master’s burden and run to proffer assistance? If disposed to envy Simon his privilege of assisting the Master in the bearing of the cross, let us reflect that many of the Lord’s brethren are daily bearing symbolic crosses, and that it is our privilege to assist them, and that the Lord agrees to reckon any service done to His faithful followers as though it were rendered to His own person….As the wooden cross was not our Lord’s heaviest burden, so, too, His followers have crosses which the world sees not, but which the “brethren” should understand. “Bear ye one another’s burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ.”