Lose you life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death to your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
-- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
This still surprises us when we come up against it. We ascent to it, even rather easily, until we are faced with the loss or letting go of something particular...something that makes us feel like we are losing life.
But what does this really mean, if it doesn't mean the areas we spend most of our time preserving, protecting, even building?
