Finding Life

There is a promise that people make to God that is probably as old as the human race, and it is this:  if you will do this for me, I'll give you anything.  Have you ever made this promise?  It's a desperate promise.  If you've made it you were probably in dire straits at the time.  And in that moment that you made the promise you probably meant it.  If God had given you what you'd needed just then, no doubt He would have had your promised devotion...for a time.  If you're like me you would have tired of being in His debt and you would have moved on.

Why is that?  I think the reason we move on from this promise is because, regardless of how dire the circumstances at the moment, a thing given without cost is easily discarded.  When we make this promise to God - when we ask Him to rescue us and in exchange offer him essentially nothing - we know that we're asking for something for nothing.  After all, our dire straits are rarely foisted upon us in innocence.  Lord knows my dire straits, my lowest points, were directly linked to some bad decisions.  I have mumbled many a dark, desperate prayer to God with my fingers crossed hoping (but not really believing) that he would get me out of just one more jam.

This is just what we do.  But here is what Jesus tells us:

"Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it"

What we are doing when we sit and fervently pray our promise to God is we are finding our life.  All those dark times I promised my worthless exchange to the Father I was searching desperately for my life - for clarity, for solutions, for stability.  For a way out.  And when you live that way what winds up happening is you lose your life.  Things go to shit.  You hit a downward spiral.  Nothing changes.

The exchange that Jesus prompts us to make, the exchange that he himself promises to follow through on, is distinctly different.  It's opposite ours.  Jesus says that we have to give up first.  If we follow his advice, our promise goes from, "If you'll help me I'll give myself up," to, "I'll give myself up, and you'll help me."  The most difficult part of this promise is that we have to give up everything before we get anything.  Or rather, before we get EVERYTHING, because that is what Jesus promises in exchange.  He promises life.  Life.  His exchange is far, far beyond the scope of what we in our desperation were willing to accept.

So here is a truth: you will not find what you seek until you first surrender your search.  That's what Jesus says; he says we have to give up what we are in order to get what we need.  Because whether we realize it or not, Life is what we're searching for.  We are hungry for this life that he offers, as surely as the lame and the blind and the destitute were hungry for it when Jesus walked this earth.  We are so hungry for it that in our times of need we make hasty, desperate promises of all that we have.  May we just learn to make those promises in the right order, and make them now.