Letting Go

Normally I won't say what I'm about to say because if I made a habit of it, it would never end... but this time I need to make an exception. I just read a book that I highly recommend for everyone if you haven't read it already - The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. Incredible! I'm a pretty extreme book lover, and that's why I don't recommend all my books to everyone; I restrain myself so I don't start to annoy people with my recommendations.

Anyway, The Great Divorce is short and a very easy read (I say that because not everyone likes reading). But I really believe this book can be life changing. Well, at least attitude-changing. I suppose life-changing is a relative term anyway. My life is always changing and I hope that never stops... I also hope it's always changing for the better, little by little (and sometimes by leaps and bounds, God willing) until I get to heaven.

I never really thought much about how difficult it is for us to let go of ourselves, but this week I'm really getting a better sense of that and learning to recognize thought patterns that are unhealthy. Nothing I can say about what I've learned from C.S. Lewis will really do his book any justice... but I'm really finding a lot of freedom in the thought that nothing we have, and nothing about ourselves really means anything in comparison with the joy of the Lord. There's a real beauty in dying to ourselves.

As Christians we hear so much about dying to ourselves, but it means much more than what we sometimes think. It's not so simple. It means every thought, every attitude, every speck of everything about ourselves we think we need. In a free country, we are so concerned about our rights, our freedom, our individuality and so on. We want to stand out from the crowd, be unique, and we sometimes won't do the right thing because we "have too much self-respect" - just remember, Jesus washed the disciples' feet! The thought of Jesus doing that really puts a lot of us to shame with all our pride and our ideas of self-respect.
Yes, God has given us each a unique personality, but we don't have to try so hard - we don't need to be focused on who we are or the respect we deserve. When we learn to die to ourselves, take up our crosses and humbly follow Jesus, we give him permission to turn our lives and our personalities into something more beautiful than we could have imagined.

When we won't let go of ourselves for the sake of Christ, whatever part of us we insist on keeping eventually turns into something ugly. It contaminates us. C.S Lewis demonstrates in one very memorable part of his book how even love can become ugly if we won't surrender it to God, and make Him the most important part of our lives. If anyone comes before Him, then we do not allow ourselves to truly love. Real love comes from God. Without Him being first in our lives, we don't fully understand the concept.

Anything eternal comes from God. So many things that are so important to us now are going to vanish when we go home to be with God and I think that the more we let go of ourselves now, the more we will have of heaven and the less we will have of hell.

There's a line from a song by Jack Johnson that's been going through my head a lot. He didn't mean exactly the same thing because he was talking about his views of the impact TV has on society - but I feel like it's along the same lines. In this song he said, "If hell is what we want, then hell is what we'll have".