The Crosses We Wear

I've recently started wearing a cross, more as a reminder to myself of what I want to live for, than any attempt to outwardly display my faith. It's a simple cross: stainless steel, small, and I like it. I always thought that Protestants were more inclined towards empty crosses as symbols, because we want to point more directly to the resurrection than to the crucifixion of Christ (not that you can have one without the other, but it seems somehow more hopeful to celebrate an empty cross). I assumed that this was equally the case for the crosses some of us wear around our necks.
I heard recently though, that--at least in terms of the crosses we wear--I'm at least partly wrong. Though I think I'll still hold on to my original assumption, it has certainly been expanded. What I've learned (from a professor who was talking to another professor, who specializes in religious symbols and iconography at Trinity College, Toronto School of Theology), is that when we wear empty crosses, we become the body on the cross. That's pretty heavy.
It's heavy, but helpful. Helpful, because it reminds me that we have been, through faith, "united in a death like his, [and] will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is free from sin." (Rom. 6:5-7) Though I try often to live as though Christ didn't die to offer me this freedom, that I haven't died to sin, though I often look longingly to that old master, the cross around my neck reminds me that I am freed from the slavery that keeps me from being free for God.
However, while this has been an expanding revelation for me, it has made me awfully sad for those who wear a cross simply as jewelry, as a fashion statement, as an ironic or passing glance at a faith they don't profess. I wonder at the crosses onto which they are climbing--presumably without recognizing it. I wonder if in fact, they are simply clinging to, climbing onto, the slavery and death of this world. It strikes me as a painful possibility.
Or perhaps, even the most ironic sporting of a cross, even the most flagrant abuse of the central symbol of Christian faith, is at least an accidental recognition of the power and promise of the Cross. Regardless, I have started to see such distasteful appropriation as a reminder that Christ died for all--not just for those of us who know, who have experienced and tasted the freedom that God longs for us. The sick--which we all are, to one degree or another--are the ones who need the doctor. So, if in the pain and horror of crucifixion, the humiliation and cruelty of death on a cross, God shows us, or rather becomes for us, the way to freedom, to truth, to life, it may be possible that in the unwitting--or otherwise--misuse of crosses can stand as a significant symbol for all sin, which was destroyed at the Cross and replaced by the grace we all need.