Let go, release, and you don’t need to white knuckle your life. Surrender to the divine, to Christ, and allow Spirit to transform your life. We must not insist on our own will, agenda, and vision, we are invited to a deep surrender and trust in the goodness of our creator. What I’m talking about is the path of transformation. Great love and great suffering are typically the triggers that drag or draw us into this journey. We don’t choose our furnace, but we do choose how we walk through the fire.

 

Teaching of Jesus #11

 

The Teaching: If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.

 

The Practice: Open your hands symbolically as you pray this week. This outward gesture is leading with your body, inviting the heart to follow in openness to the Spirit. Ask God to illuminate and name things, attitudes, people, situations, ect… that you need to surrender in order for your transformation process to continue. Continue to loose your life into the teachings of Jesus.

 

We must name what to let go of, or what has been taken from us. Jesus invites us into a new stance towards our suffering, he offers a new attitude that believes the father is good and will use all things, even what we consider bad, for our good transformation. What I’m talking about here is a daily practice that is not easily assimilated into our character. We must be continually adhered to the teaching, to not insist on our own life, but to radically trust in the teachings of Jesus, to put them on and allow the transforming work and power to flow within our lives. Then we can find the life God has hidden for us in Jesus. I am invited to surrender, and acceptance of the teachings with out my personal judgments. I must trust that this promised life is good, but like CS Lewis says, we only know our homespun mud pies, when the Spirit is inviting us into a holiday at the sea.

 

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” C_S_Lewis