Living is Dying

I have been overwhelmed by the love coming through so many people in the last few weeks; it is humbling and beautiful.  Through these varied and heartfelt encouragements, I’ve had a brand new view of this Christian life.  Living is dying, and dying is living.

My life before Christ didn’t hold the possibility of internal change.  When I got restless, it was time to move or change jobs or meet new people or find new hobbies.  I had to change the external because I had no reason to believe that I could ever be fundamentally different.  I believed, with my whole heart, that people don’t really change.  Not ever.

Also, I didn’t see any real reason why someone would want to be a Christian.  It looked dull and tedious and fake.  If my life was stuck in an auto-loop of sameness on the inside, I couldn’t imagine limiting my external options to the kiddie rides in life’s amusement park.  No thanks and keep the fish stickers!  It was this vision of inescapable sameness that induced utter despair in me.  I couldn’t see anything bigger or higher or unbounded by life’s dreary limits.

But what I’m glimpsing for the first time, through this Cross, is the perpetual change of life with Christ.  It’s unbelievable!  Every time I embrace the Cross, I die.  And every time I die, I begin to live anew.  Life resurrected into a whole new state of being from the ashes of what I died to when the Cross came.  I am no longer the same.

I have always understood adventure as an external event.  But though this change affects the external, it operates entirely within me.  Resurrection life is no longer just an idea or platitude or theory.  After every Cross encounter, I am changed.  I see differently, I think differently, and I relate to my life differently.  Sometimes I love things that I never loved before, and sometimes I have no interest in things that were once very important to me.  My world may be the same, but I am not and that changes everything.

Of course, change is very hard for me right now.  Sometimes I sit down and cry because I just don’t know how to handle the latest upheaval in my life.  But I begin to see this life of the Cross as the training needed to move as the Spirit wills.  I am not naturally flexible, but God is breaking my stiffness and pushing me outside my hobbit hole.  I’ll be flexible yet!

I find myself rather jubilant at the thought of tomorrow and what it may bring.  My life is an adventure, and every day I see this amazing world in new light.  God’s light.  I haven’t been bored in two years and two months.  Not since I met Jesus Christ and started to live dead.