“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matthew 16:25). Many of us often find ourselves saving up our lives. We’ll start exercising once we can afford a gym membership. We’ll get back to our hobby as soon as things get a little less crazy at work. We’ll meet up with that friend we haven’t seen in forever just as soon as we get our car fixed. We become convinced that if we plan our lives just right, we will get to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow where there is no more struggle or doubt or indecisiveness and we can really just start living our lives. This golden life for which we are working so hard and sacrificing so much isn’t important merely for our own satisfaction. Once our lives are perfect, we will be able to use that perfection to radiate goodness out to all others and change the world for the better. If we plan and control everything just right, then everyone’s lives will be perfect. So we don’t give five dollars to the homeless vet in the street because we need to save every penny right now because we’re going to be billionaires someday and then we’ll be able to save all of the vets and give everyone a home to live in. We let our relationships with our family members languish and shrivel up because we have to put in the work and pay now so we can play later. Saving up our time and our talents and our energy for some glittering mirage that is and always will be just out of our reach only means that we will have lost every opportunity to make our own lives and the lives of those around us better through small and simple acts directed by the Spirit that seem like foolishness to us because they don’t fit into our master plan. When Christ invites us to lose our lives for His sake, He is not asking us to give up all of the things we like and trudge along in bland and joyless servitude. All Christ is really asking us to do is to stop trying to plan out our future. We don’t know what we’re doing. We can buy up all of the vineyards as far as the eye can see and have so many grapes that we have to tear down our barns and build bigger ones and set ourselves up with enough resources to never have to work again for fifty years and then we can drop dead before we’ve even had a chance to kick back and prop our feet up. This thing we have in our heads of what our lives are supposed to look like isn’t real. Life is not something that we can hold onto or keep locked up safe and tight. To lose our life for Christ’s sake is to recognize that we “are not [our] own... For [we] are bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). For those of us who are predisposed to worry and would feel much more comfortable with a scrupulously detailed plan, it can be very nerve wracking to have this kind of trust in the Lord that requires us to be “led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which [we] should do.” (1 Nephi 4:6). In forcing us to stagger and stumble in the dark until we find each brief and fleeting flicker of light and hope, we might even come to the conclusion that God is being deliberately cruel and derives some kind of sick pleasure in watching us wander about to no purpose. But God isn’t being mysterious out of caprice or vanity. There is joy in discovery. There is a relief in wandering through the desert and stumbling on an oasis just moments before dying of thirst that compares to nothing else. There is a peace that comes at the end of a knockdown, dragout fight that has gone on for so long it has almost become a war of attrition but finally, finally there is agreement and harmony that is so much better than anything that either side could have imagined before the fight began. As Rudyar Kipling wrote in his poem “If”, “If you can make one heap of all your winnings / And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, / And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss / Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.” Some of us have lost everything and have had to start again from scratch. Somehow, we found a way. It was not easy or pleasant. We may have had to swallow our pride and to beg for help from others. We may have had to walk out on obligations and renege on debts and break promises. But no matter how impossible it seemed at the time, we found a way through. And if we are in the midst of the storm right now, and this time, for sure, there will be no way out, if we will just surrender to the Lord and allow our will to be swallowed up in His and lose our lives for His sake, then we will find a way through even this. God doesn’t need us to be perfect. He doesn’t need us to finish our master plan before He can put us to work. All He needs are small and simple things. People who have given up the idea that their version of life is important or essential. Such people don’t care how and when and to what purpose the Lord uses them. They are happy to serve wherever and however the Lord sees fit. They trust that though their efforts might seem small and simple and unimportant, God will still make something marvelous and wonderful and completely different from what they planned or expected. I hope that whenever we find ourselves wanting a particular vision for our lives so fiercely that we have pressed the image tight against our faces, that we will have the faith to let go of that image so that we can have the eyes to see and to find the hidden and wonderful life that God has prepared for us.
