Loose your life: Find your life.

 “If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you’ll lose it, but if you let that life go, you’ll get life on God’s terms. (Luke 17:33 MSG)

It's funny how all of a sudden this verse makes so much sense to me, when I had read it or heard it a thousand times and never been impacted. 

It seems we spend so much time trying to build our own life, wanting to do stuff on our own terms. 

We are doing stuff our own way and wondering why it's not working. 

Further more we are trying to get God to agree to our terms and follow our agenda. 

Yes! We definitely want his help and we need him to answer us, but we want him to do it our way. 

When what he is saying here is when you lay all that down, that's when you actually find your life the way it's supposed to be. 

You cannot choose God and take parts of your old self with you, it has to complete surrender.

It must be the whole of you. 

It's in that moment when you find your life being built up right before your eyes and God making things happen that you did not even consider being possible. 

It's in that moment that you find your agenda not even mattering because the second your trusting him with your whole self, you realize what he has for you is far greater in every way possible. 

It's when you feel like you have lost your ideal life that you turn around and find your actual life in Him. 

He speaks between the lines.

Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”). (John 20:11-16 NIV)

Sometimes all he says to me is

my name. 

And regardless of what going on in my mind and heart everything stops. 

Sometimes he repeats it until I can hear him over myself... 

Too often I do not listen, too often I still hold myself back, as if I am the better shield. 

Its always one word in the bible that captures me, I can read passage after passage and not actually focus enough to take in any of it. 

Until I see one thing that is clearer then anything, just one single word that makes total sense. 

I almost always cannot sit through a sermon and listen to a whole message. But he always gets me with one statement or one word. 

He speaks through my distraction and it's exactly what I need to hear. 

And time and time again all he needs to say is my name before I realize who it is that stands before me is far greater then what I think I cannot face. 

 I am stilled even if just for a moment. 

I breathe in the calmness of it. 

I just rest within him. 

Because in this very moment he speaks between the lines. 

He overpowers every distraction. 

He becomes greater then any feelings. 

He becomes louder then my thoughts. 

He stills me. 

In this moment.

He is.