The most important advice I’ve ever received came from a man who lived in the early 1900's but his truth rings clear today just as it always has and always will.
“Your real new self – which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours only because it is HIS– will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for HIM! Does that sound strange? The same principle holds for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself and you will find yourself. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fiber of your being and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing! Nothing that you have will ever be really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find HIM, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
– C.S. Lewis
The dichotomy of losing your life to find it never made sense to me until recently when I did all these things: died to my ambitions for my life, looked for God in the little details of my life and joyfully accepted the opportunities He put into my life that this quote began to make sense. I am a true testament to this truth in that when I died to myself Christ who lives in me took over and blessed me beyond belief. These blessings were in the natural whether it be a new home or a new car or someone anonymously giving me $2000 for a trip to Haiti or a $3000 infrared sauna. HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN? It’s because once you die to yourself nothing is yours. So if you give something away it comes back to you. Maybe not from the same person but it comes back! You cannot be in this loop of blessings until you have the mind set that nothing is your own. None of these natural blessings are as important as those that came into my very being, the ones that inhabited my soul. The spiritual blessings were those of which are unexplainable,
A joy that surpasses understanding
A peace that is constant
A love beyond measure...
What’s holding you back from giving all of yourself away?
Until you do I venture to say you are not truly living...
God promised an abundant life but it may not be how you expected to find it, huh ?
Yeah, well, me either...
