... stand in the ruins (cont'd)

Along the lines of "the man eating tiger has got to go," today, my former IV trainer and friend Alex Kirk (incidentally, a very wise man) posted on life brought forth from death. I thought it was well put, so I thought I would share an excerpt with you. You can read the whole post here.

"...The dynamic of things dying and new things springing up brought me to this prayer: Lord, what in me needs to die so that something new might spring to life?

This, of course, is the Christian story. The hope that we proclaim is a messy hope. It is life that only comes on the other side of death.

Jesus goes to the cross, endures the shame, dies a brutal death, and then three days later is raised victoriously. The victory is the last and loudest word. But it only comes on the other side of the death.

As with Jesus, so it is with us. We live only as we die. We discover more and more life only as we willingly put things to death in us that are themselves death--the gangrenous, poisonous, corrosive activities and thoughts and beliefs that rob us of joy and life [...]

And it's scary. Because putting something to death hurts like hell--it's a real death, not a surface fix. So we run away from the very path that would offer us life because at least we know what we have--even if it's a poor substitute for a real life, at least it's a known quantity.

But the economy of the kingdom is that life comes from death. That's how the exchange works. We have Jesus as our brother and king who has led the way--he is not calling us to do anything that he himself has not done already."

In order to kill the weed, you must cut out the root. In order for new life to spring up, sometimes things in us have to die. And so we stand in the ruins, asking,

"Lord, what do you want to do? Where do you long to uproot and make new?"