Find Your Life, Day 1 of the Pin God First challenge

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Pin God 1st - from Jennifer Dukes Lee's site
The first piece of Scripture for the Pin God First challenge is Matthew 10:39:
Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
The phrase which came to me was "find your life" (and that's not even correct, it's "find their life"). I delved into the context, as this is toward the end of Jesus talking about loving God first above all else, even family, taking up the cross and leaving all behind.

Last night, my hubby and I went to see "The Good Lie" which has Reese Witherspoon in the supporting cast. It's about the lost children of Sudan and their long journey to America. It broke my heart twice -- because it's a recent release I won't reveal the spoilers -- so let's just say it was an incredibly unjust moment and a beautiful heart/soul moment.

Tears kept welling up on the way home and this movie disturbed me. Disturbed me in my inaction. How could I know about these things and not help? How could these stories of survival cause admiration and not the conviction that I had done nothing to help?

In the dark of morning I knew I had to do something.

Find your life.

What if the two halves of this scripture are not bad/good, or negative/positive but both point to the Way. The psalms use this structure frequently: saying the same thing twice but differently. (Pretty sure there's a technical name for this, as its poetry, but I've forgotten it.)

What if "Those who find their life shall lose it" means that one has found the point of living, that is, in Christ, and what we lose is the rest of the world's ideas about what life should be like: big houses, disposable items, many possessions, a concept of human beauty that never matches reality, the distractions and numbingness of entertainment news (aka all news), reality shows, and TV dramas.

Thus, the life we have is living the way of Christ and the world thinks that what has happened is that we have lost our lives. But in following the Way, we have found the true life.

After the movie, I couldn't rest, I still can't, I wanted to be "all in". Go to West Africa and be love to the children orphaned by Ebola. Do something.

And this is me: I am "all in" until I reflect on my life circumstances: husband, dog, job, fighting my own fears in "catching something", whether or not this is even in my wheel-house/skill-set...

I am going to look for ways I can be part of the body of Christ to the lost children. Maybe instead of Liberia or the Sudan, it'll be Burundi or right here where I live.

I will find my life.

PS. In the sitting in silence part of lectio divina, I listen to God, but today I heard nothing. I am woefully out of practice of listening to Him, but perhaps he came through in my ruminating as I'd always seen this scripture as either/or before. I thought I would mention this in case you thought that somehow lectio divina means you always hear from God.

There are also little activities for each day. Today was buy flowers for yourself

Comments

  1. SarahNovember 9, 2014 at 8:33 AM

    That's why Christians should think on the order of the great commission: in Jerusalem, and in Judea, and in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.... Which reminds me, I haven't been talking to the homeless/ volunteering since we moved out of DC, and it's not because Savannah is free of poverty but because I'm not seeing those folks in my daily travels like I used to. Which indicates that something in my life needs recalibrating....

    Think about who is the closest person in your life that you can love, and then who the needy are around you.

    ReplyDelete

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