Loss

More Precious than Silver, J.E. Tada

It's tough to lose...yet God makes the supreme request of us: lose yourself. Ah, but not for our own  sakes and certainly not for nothing. To lose your life for Jesus' sake is to not only find Him but find the "you" you are supposed to be. The you God has in mind. 
No matter how connected we are with our loved ones, we are always left aching for more, for someone to comprehend our world and enter our struggle---to embrace us with a passion that seizes and melts us into a union that will never be broken. God answers this ancient longing.
The offer to lose yourself for Christ's sake is incredibly enticing; to catch God's good mood, to delight in the cascade of His joy, and to feel Him embracing you with a passion, seizing and melting you into a union with Him that can never be broken. 

I have spent years fighting. Fighting to not lose me, change who I was. I wanted to stay the same. As a youth I wanted to keep my anger. It was right to be angry...(although honestly I am not sure what I was angry about). I wasn't going to give it up. Anger was my RIGHT. I read "Stepping Heavenward" at the age of 14...and terror filled me, because the book was about an angry youth, and the terrible hardships she found by holding onto that anger. One line shook me to the core..."your character (said to the daughter from the mother) will be solidified by your twentieth year. I hope it is better than now (at 16). I had clung to rage so long that at that point I tried to change...thinking I would be stuck however I was at 20 for life. A ridiculous thought, life does not actually work that way...change continues, even with our best efforts at stopping it. 
I fought change and loss every step.
How foolish. Change and loss...especially change and loss to God is so worthwhile. It doesn't seem like it, especially at first. The change and loss is so against what we think should happen that we decide it is a fate worse than death. If we didn't change or lose anything...that would be a fate worse than death. I would still be stuck in the fury I was as a pre teen...and who wants to be stuck as a pre-teen the rest of their life? 
I have given much up to loss lately, and I was describing today that the more I focus on God and learn about God, the bigger He gets. It is as if as I am downloading the file, the file is getting infinitely bigger. God is infinitely more loving, more kind, more powerful, more concerned, more everything and more anything today than I could have ever imagined yesterday...and so it has been the last little bit. He is so incredible that giving up what I have lost is nothing. Nothing. Worthless. The connection with God is what is most important, not whether I can work, whether I can do anything...just knowing and worshiping God is the amazing thing. It's worth it to get lost in God...because you do find out more about yourself. And He starts to change you anyway, and that turns out better than you ever thought it could. 
I am so glad God is in charge and not me...I'd ruin it all...and still be in a rage and full of many other things that have been slowly ironed out by "losing" myself. Thank the Lord!