Monday morsel: "dying to live"

This past week I've been reading Rob Bell's Love Wins.  This book, which challenges some conventional Christian assumptions, raised some controversy when it came out a couple of years ago, but I'm enjoying it:  it's bracing, like being hit with a splash of ice-cold water.  ("Thanks, I needed that!")  And I like Bell's style, which is both provocative and poetic.  Here's a passage I especially liked:


 
"When we say yes to God, when we open ourselves to Jesus's living, giving act on the cross, we enter in to a way of life.  He is the source, the strength, the example, and the assurance that this pattern of death and rebirth is the way into the only kind of life that actually sustains and inspires.

Jesus talks about death and rebirth constantly, his and ours.  He calls us to let go, turn away, renounce, confess, repent, and leave behind the old ways.  He talks of the life that will come from his own death, and he promises that life will flow to us in thousands of small ways as we die to our egos, our pride, our need to be right, our self-sufficiency, our rebellion, and our stubborn insistence that we deserve to get our way.  When we cling with white knuckles to our sins and our hosility, we're like a tree that won't let its leaves go.  There can't be a spring if we're still stuck in the fall.

 Lose your life and find it, he says.

That's how the world works.

That's how the soul works.

That's how life works 
when you're dying to live."