Heart Tracks - The Chance

     Have you noticed the tendency, not only in others, but in ourselves, that when we are faced with some great disappointment or loss, we tend to think our lives are over?  It may not be what we say, but it certainly may be what we think and feel.  We just don't feel we can go on, that what we've lost or never even had, is too much.  We feel life is over, and so, though we may continue to breathe, move about, and give the appearance of life, inside, we feel completely disconnected to all that.  We may be living, but we're not alive.  I don't mean to minimize the pain of loss, but could our inability to get past the loss be a result of our living the wrong kind of life.  A life lived for self, and not Christ.

    We will never be free from pain and loss this side of eternity, but they needn't define our lives.  The life we knew before the loss may indeed be "over" but not the life that we can have in Christ.  All through His Word we are exhorted to "go on" with Him.  Yet the landscape is filled with lives that were not able to do this.  They sit by the wayside, crippled, unmoving, trapped in their sorrow and grief.  Victims  They have not been able to go on in Him.  For them, the pain of the loss, be it from death, divorce, betrayal, and any of hundreds of other causes is just as deep and paralyzing as when it first happened.  There is healing for this, but it will be painful to the self-life.  Painful because it requires death.  Death to the self-life that cannot let go, in order to lay hold of the Christ-life that brings the fullness of healing and victory.
   Jesus said in  John 12, "Truly, truly I say to you unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit."  The life of the victim is also doomed to being alone.  Comforting words and actions don't help.  Even the promises of the King seem empty and untrue.  We're held in the grip of death, and the only way out is to die.  Die to our insistence of holding on to the pain, the loss, and all the anger, resentment, and yes, self-pity that go along with it.  When we are willing to die to that life, we can then truly begin to live in His.  We're no longer alone, but alive in His Presence and fullness.  We get up from the side of the road, and go on with Him.  No longer barren, our lives really do become fruitful.  The loss, even the pain associated with it, is not forgotten, but neither does it any longer hold us in its chains.  We have died to that, and now live to Him.  We go on with Him in a new and living way.  We've released our grip on "our" life, and laid hold of His.
   There was a book written about the life of Amy Carmichael titled, A Chance To Die.  In the midst of the pain, losses, and frustrated desires of life, the Father gives us in each and all of them, a chance to die to their hold upon us.  A chance to die to ourselves that we might live in and for Him.  That chance will come to us today and everyday.  A chance to die, leading to a chance to live.  Will we take the chance?

Blessings,
Pastor O