Tuesday, August 02, 2011

How do we live life? Risk it all.

Here are some thoughts I put down tonight...

fighting There is no risk bigger than deciding to love someone beyond all capacity. When we decided to adopt Allie, my wife and I went to war with each other over private moments of peace. Our days and nights were filled with fiery battles. We both claimed that the other wasn't shouldering a fair share of the load. I was a selfless martyr and she was a slacker. We tore into each other like wounded animals. I wanted to leave.

“If you’re leaving, don’t wait,” Susan said. “If you’re going to do it, do it now so I can get on with figuring out how life is going to work.”

This wasn’t living. It wasn’t even surviving. I had to make some kind of decision. I was looking for an option that was void of pain. But an option like that didn't exist. If I left, I would be miserable knowing I shrank from my clear call to duty. If I stayed, I would have to sacrifice everything I hoped to have at this time in my life. I hoped that Susan and I would have the freedom to come and go as we pleased. We could have been empty nesters.

I made a decision to serve my wife and Allie no matter what the cost. This was the only clear, common-sense option. I couldn’t get Romans 12 out of my head. I needed to become a living sacrifice. The only way our little family unit would weather this was to serve selflessly, expecting nothing in return. This isn't personal piety and this isn’t an attempt at superior spirituality. It was the only rational thing I could do to survive. This is what God was waiting for me to discover. Being a living sacrifice isn’t just a mystical way of doing Christianity. It’s not a life of simply reading the Bible, memorizing a few verses, singing songs, going to church, and obeying a few rules. The way Christianity works was summed up best by Jesus when he said, “…whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it (Matthew 16:25 ESV).”

Check out this quote from C.S. Lewis

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.

Related links

  • A Start
  • I'm Gonna Do It
  • Is there a book anywhere in here?
  • No comments: