How do you choose love over fear?
How do you find yourself? How do you dig down into the heart of the life you’ve been searching for?
"Don't run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I'll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?"*
You sacrifice your ego, the False Self, that grasps and hides and seeks to control and dominate because it cannot trust that there is enough room and love and grace and belonging for everyone to exist within - that's what you put on the altar; that is what you deny; that is what you walk away from.
And oh, how it hurts to lay your ego to rest. But as you lean into that pain, and you follow love all the way to your deepest and truest identity, you find your true self.
What kind of deal is it to let your ego run the show, get everything you want, but lose yourself?
Is there anything in the world worth trading your soul for?
Let me tell you here and now that the message of Jesus - of his death, burial and resurrection - is that there is nothing more holy and beautiful and precious than your soul, than all of our souls, than the humanity that you are and that we all are together.
Nothing.
Your True Self is worth more than the fleeting pleasure of a momentarily gratified ego.
Around one year after saying those words to his friends, Jesus did carry an actual cross.
You see, what happens when we keep going the way of our ego, individually and collectively, is that we end up crucifying the things that will save us.
What Matthew recorded Jesus as saying was deeply political, as in, it had to do with how we live together in the world, more than it was some kind of prophecy and warning about what Jesus would go through.
You can always tell how much ego is at play in a community when you see how it treats the marginalised, those on the edges and the outer. You can always tell how much falseness a government relies on when it lacks generosity and compassion and grace, or by seeing how much violence it sanctions, and equally, turns a blind eye too.
We must deny the operation of these things in the world, take up our crosses, follow Jesus, the way of love, all the way to that hill and let them end there.
What does it profit our lives, our communities and nations, if we gain the world, if we have the latest technologies, wealth and achievement, lucrative exports, fearsome weapons, extensive military capacity, perceived place of power,
if we lose our soul?
Are these things worth the essence of our lives, communities, and nations?
The only way to find yourself - to get to the heart of life and what you've been looking for - is to deny the False Self and journey deeper and deeper into what is truest in you.
The False Self is motivated by fear, and the True Self is motivated by love.
Your life is a practice of choosing love over fear, every day, in a thousand different ways. Sometimes you'll win, sometimes you'll learn. Sometimes you'll feel hurt and traumatised, and sometimes you'll feel the sharp shame of hurting others. And then sometimes the work and monotony of it will make you want to give up, and at other times, the joy and beauty of it will bring you to your knees.
But always, you'll have the power of the Jesus story, the witness of death to life, of pain, burial, and resurrection to show you the way.
Mindful Prompt: Love over fear. Love over Fear. Love over Fear. Love over Fear.
* Matthew 16:24-26
Continued in the upcoming Easter series "How To Choose Love Over Fear", this week with a subscription in the App.
Written by Liz Milani.
Instagram: @thepracticeco
