Whosoever Will Save His Life Shall Lose It

“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matthew 16:25). Most of us spend a lot of time and energy thinking about and planning and preparing for the future. Many of us believe that it is possible to plan and prepare carefully enough so that we have foreseen every obstacle and can thus avoid any and all pain and hardship. We lavish our dreams with every comfort and secure them with impregnable defenses, but no matter how carefully we stack the pieces of our imagined future, life has a way of caroming through our carefully constructed futures with all the destructive energy of a toddler through a stack of blocks. Careers can become obsolete, savings can evaporate, health can be stolen, homes or whole towns can be swept away by famine or fire or flood. The harder we try to cling to the life that we have saved and set aside, the faster and more thoroughly we will lose it. But there is another way. We can give up on our sense of control, we can relinquish our hold on tomorrow. We can lose the life we have planned willingly, and in its stead give room in our souls for the Savior. When we lose our lives for the Savior’s sake, we lean not on our own understanding, but trust in the Lord to guide and direct us. It can be hard to let go of the cherished futures we had imagined for ourselves, but when we can acknowledge that our plans consulted too much our own desire and fancies and took little enough into account the unpredictable chaos that the future can bring, and when we can recognize that not only can God see a lot farther into the future than we can, but that He also has the power to prepare His way before us, then in the end losing the lives we had planned is no great loss when we consider that the life that God has been saving in store and preparing for us is far better than anything we could have imagined.