To Live is Christ

I wrote an essay for the last college class I took, two years ago, which I wanted to post here. The assignment was to talk about your "mission in life," so here it is. It remains unchanged, because the God I love and serve remains always the same. May God spare me from trial for trials' sake, and may He grant me the great joy of sharing in the fellowship of His sufferings as well as His resurrection.

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I have always been a relatively self-centered person. Most of my life I’ve focused on my own ambitions for success, for prestige and recognition, and for approval from my family and friends. Even my motivation for wanting to “make the world a better place” usually centered on the desire to feel good about myself, and to have others look up to me as noble and exemplary.

But in the last year, the radical, self-sacrificial love of Jesus has seduced me, captivated me, enveloped me, and fundamentally and irreversibly transformed my entire being. The fact that Jesus, “being in very nature God,” willingly sacrificed himself for the sake of all humanity, breaks my heart of all pride and attempts at self-justification and seeking my own glory, and instead frees me to live for the author of life alone, to love others as he loves me, and to give him the life which he first gave me.

“To live is Christ, to die is gain.” These words were penned by the apostle Paul while he was imprisoned for preaching the good news, awaiting a probable execution that he later met. This is a radically positive view of both death and life—that in death we are united with the Lord and Love of our lives, and that in life we live through him, in him and for him. He promised us that “neither death nor life…nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.” Therefore we are free from our fears, free from our own self-interest, free to live for others as Christ lived for us.

I thank God that he has given me a passion for reconciliation between peoples, for peace and understanding to transform groups that once hated and killed each other. I believe that only the radical love of Jesus—who taught us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, and who showed that love for enemies of God like myself by dying on the cross—only this love can truly heal people, can truly bring forgiveness and reconciliation to situations so oppressed by violence and despair. I believe that God has given me ability to understand people, to learn languages, and to have compassion for suffering, all very necessary for this work. But coming from an upper-middle class American, who has experienced very little suffering in my life, the message that we should forgive those who kill our children or destroy our lives will likely fall on deaf ears apart from God’s power. So my hope is that if God wants to use me in this way, he’ll give me the power to have an impact, even if it requires my own suffering—through imprisonment, hunger, torture, or even death—so that my life and my death will be a vehicle for others to come and know the Love that set me free.

To me, Jesus’ message of good news is one of love conquering fear, of life conquering death. But this was only done through the death of the very One through whom life was created. So if Jesus let himself be put to death and thereby transformed all of creation, I, who am of infinitely lower worth, have no reason to hold back any part of me, no reason to fear giving to him what he already gave me. “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” I want to lose my life and find new Life in him, “to share in the fellowship of his sufferings,” so that I can be a small part of that beautiful transformation from suffering to joy, from hatred to love, from inescapable death to eternal life.