Losing Our Lives

We just keep losing things: wives, husbands, friends, children, health, the dreams and the security of the past. Nothing stays the way it was.
I have yet to meet an adult who is living the life he or she planned. Some people are thrilled about that: "Thank God life turned out so much better than I had hoped."
Seldom does a week go by, though, that I don't meet with those who are a long way from thanking God for a loss of what was cherished. Nobody wants to be abandoned.
Typically, those who consider themselves abandoned were deserted by something or someone they needed. It could be that a wife comes home to find a note on the table
: "I'm leaving you." Or an employee of twenty years walks into his bosses office to be told he is being laid off that day. Maybe a young woman who undergoes a mastectomy and wonders if she will ever stop crying. These people had counted on a spouse or a career or at least their health. One day these things are gone, and life will never again be the same.

In the course of life, we expect to suffer some necessary losses. Children grow up and leave home. A new job in a different town forces us to say goodbye to friends and family in the place we have to leave. Eventually, one aged spouse places the other in the hands of God. Some abandonments we count on, but that does not mean they are less painful.
One of the most heroic things people do is voluntarily leave their comfortable dissatisfactions with life in order to receive the new opportunity they hope is waiting around the corner.
When that happens, their experience may not be filled with the pathos (Pathos is associated with emotion, such as appealing to an audience's sympathies and imagination. One common way to convey a pathetic appeal is through a narrative or a story that communicates an abstract lesson or meaning through a concrete experience. Values, beliefs and understandings of the arguer are implied and communicated to the audience through the story) of those who are deserted, but their abandoned journey through fear and grief into the new life is no less dramatic.

However it comes, abandonment can always be embraced as the opportunity to receive a new life. A devastated widow can outlive her grief. A hurt, disappointed divorce eventually picks up the broken pieces and begins again. A lost job can become the beginning of a new vocation.
Making the choice to accept abandonment as the opportunity to discover a new life is hard. It is as great a challenge as life ever presents us. Yet is an absolute central dynamic to the Christian life.

If we are planning on spending very much time following Jesus Christ, we can count on a great deal of abandonment. He kept trying to tell that to His disciples. Matthew (16:25) "Only those who lose their lives will find them."
We have a name for this process in the church it's called 'conversion'.
The Bible is a story of men and woman, who have discovered they are not living the life they had planned. Each of them has faced significant loss. Something that they once held dear has been taken away, and that has forced them to make a frightening choice. Will they clutch at something else for their salvation? Or can they leave their hands open long enough to receive the life Jesus died to give them?
Rev William Bowers