I used to hate to read. And I mean unequivocally hated to read. It was boring. It took up time. I didn’t relate to any characters…
…then I read met Morrie Schwartz.
You see, Mitch Albom wrote a book a while back —Tuesday’s With Morrie. It chronicled a time in Mitch’s life where he would visit with Morrie every Tuesday (hence the title) and his old professor would share with him the secrets of life. Morrie was also on his death bed as he did this…kind of morbid, but I was completely captured by the story and the secrets Morrie shared…
He told secrets of love, laughter, money, and relationships. All of the topics he spoke of taught Mitch how to live a better life. To Morrie, there was one important key…Mitch needed to die.
“What the hell? I have to die to live? I’ll pass”
And I did. Day after day, week after week, month after month and so on. I mean…why would I want to die? Where was the fun in that? There wasn’t any as far as I could tell. In not seeing it, I missed the boat…per usual.
I stumbled across Morrie as I was digging through a box of old books recently. As I flipped through the worn pages, there it was again…
How did I not see it earlier? How did I not understand that the same thing Morrie taught Mitch was also the same thing God has been trying to get me to do?
Easy. I used to be afraid to die. And that’s not all I was afraid of…
I was afraid to give up the things in my life that I thought mattered. I was afraid to move on. I was afraid of rejection. Fear sucks by the way. It’s a manipulative emotion that causes us to live boring lives…and in doing so I never wanted to be the person that was desired of me, just the person desired by me. I was selfish. I was stupid. I was so lost on the road less traveled it took years for someone to find me.
Eventually though, I heard that voice. The voice. The one that keep saying…“Hey Kent, remember me?”…even during the times of my life when my vision was blurred and I only trusted myself. The times when I wanted to do things for Him, but wouldn’t cling to Him or sit and glean in Him because I didn’t have time.
Thankfully — my Yahweh doesn’t go down without a fight. No matter how good I was/am at knocking him back down.
A love and passionate pursuing like that made me realize I just get in the way and need to play the background role. This is a God who holds steady a billion stars in place and knows exactly what he’s doing. I needed to, like John writes, “decrease so He can increase” (John 3:30).
So I died. I died yesterday. I’ll die today, and I’ll die tomorrow. I die to live. To let God take the lead so I can quit drawing my own lines and instead let him draw his own for me. In doing so, I won’t end up down the path of destruction, but the path of righteousness…but I have to do it every day. It can’t be a sometimes act… not a spur of the moment when I’m really feelin’ the spirit act. It should be an every second of every day act.
Because when that happens…the person desired of us becomes the person desired by us as well. Our lives are one with Him, not one with our multitude of sins.
So what are the perks of dying on a daily basis? Well, for starters — all those times of worry, stress, anger, and being lonely are replaced with…
worthy from being wonderfully made (Psalm 139:13-15)
Is it worth dying for? Without a doubt, yes…because life…
And neither does that of which I can accomplish by dying. So I choose to die. Now, forever, and every day in between.
