Losing My Life

For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. ~Matthew 16:25

That speaks against all rational thinking, right? Lose your life, to find it. And if I lose my life, will I like the life I find?

Who knows better than me what I need in life, right?

So let me ask you this - how's life working for you?

I'll be the first to admit - it wasn't working so well for me. I mean from the outside it looked pretty good. I had all my "stuff" together and a pretty good front of being who everyone needed me to be.

Inside...I was a wreck in so many ways. Torn in a thousand different directions, trying to serve a thousand different masters.

Continual failure, never pleasing everyone, always drowning in my duties and responsibilities.

Never truly happy for long, discontented, disappointed, and frustrated with my inability to "get it right".

Lost in this world, searching for the point, living without a passion, and going through the motions.

I had the "good Christian" act going. But I never lost my life to Him. He was an accessory. A label. A social club. Another duty.

And then something changed. Better yet, I think Someone changed me, because I've never gotten a thing right in my life. My attempts at "check box" Christianity were always met with dry and feeble connections to God.

And for a while now I've been falling down this "Alice and Wonderland" rabbit hole of Him. Discovering Him more and more - and finding that there is no end to this falling. He is all-consuming and never ending.

Little by little, He's been releasing my grip on this life I've built up and turning my heart towards Him. He's been opening up dark holes in me that I'd long since considered "Off limits". He's been reigniting passions in me that I'd given up years ago.

I feel...on fire.

I feel...consumed.

I feel...free.

Some days these feelings are SO strong I want to run out into the street and scream it for all to hear:

Life doesn't have to be like this. There IS another way. There is Someone so wonderful out there, you can't even imagine it!

I am no longer who I was. And yet, I was never me. God is opening up this whole new world of who I can be in Him, and His work is just so beautiful.

But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. ~ 2 Corinthians 3:16-18