No life without death

“Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.”–Jesus Christ (Gospel of John 12.24-25 The Message).

You know, we should get along better with death.

It’s a much a part of our lives as three square a day. The truth is: The life in our lives is dependent on death.

Let’s start with minutiae. Your habit of watching an hour of what may be excellent TV each day may have to die so that you can begin living a more excellent life each day (perhaps by reading, running, or writing).

Your junk food habit may have to die so that you can live longer to enjoy more healthful meals with your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

Bigger examples:

So that your family and marriage might come to life and thrive, you put to death your rights as a single person. Perhaps you end some relationships that were important to you, but are no longer appropriate. You give up having sex with anyone you choose to learn how to have sexual union with one person. You die to the dating scene with it constant new thrills to live into the profundity of marriage.

To answer your calling and to put down roots in the place that God makes for you in the world, you put to death the familiarity of home and the proximity of family.

To grow and mature in faith through fellowship with one church, you put to death your attraction to several different Christian traditions where the grass is always greener.

To do work that is meaningful, powerful, and uses all of your giftedness, you put to death a career, job security, or the traditional ladder of success that everyone seems to expect and reward.

Generosity itself is a death act. You part with possessions that you could use for your own enjoyment in order to discover how rich you can truly be when you give it away.

We know, don’t we, that dying is the only way to live? We cannot take hold of something without letting something else go.

We know, don’t we, that often the choice to make is between something good and something great? Something that feels good now and something that will feel like heaven later. Something that will make us feel alive and something that will make us alive indeed.

Perhaps our aversion to death in our culture is that in our daily practice of death, we so often choose the wrong thing. That is, we so often choose to keep the present alive (instant gratification) at the cost of letting our future die. We choose the momentary feeling at the cost of what could be true forever.

We’re not afraid of death. We choose it all the time.

What we’re really afraid of is life.