Spiritually, life comes after death; a spiritual truth that must be practiced to be realised; a universal truth that works when we work it — plied by faith.
Life after death — death to selfishness, death of dreams, death of our pride, all kinds of spiritual death — when we allow these ‘deaths’, life beckons; that’s what we Christians practice.
It’s what makes the maxim “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” real through the cross (death) and resurrection (life) of Jesus.
This is what it is: the resurrection gives us both life eternal and life temporal.
Here is how it works in this life:
Many times in this life we struggle and stumble. We don’t always get it right and many times we become bewildered by where life takes us. Some days we just want to give up! And some days we do!
All this is normal in any life,
no matter how “good” we’ve got it.
Life comes into us after we experience spiritual death —
when we come to the end of ourselves.
When we agree, once again — and it is a repetitive process — that our personal strength can take us only so far — and we need God’s strength — right there, we feel the infilling of God’s Spirit that makes us stronger for the present moment, giving us hope for the tasks ahead. Life comes after death.
The key to arriving at the juncture of death (coming to the end of ourselves) is to literally give up. Acknowledging that our way’s not working is the key point in time when hope rises.
We may not feel hopeful,
but our prospects are stoked with hope.
The first step of AA’s Twelve Steps is to admit life is unmanageable without the help of God. When drunks arrive at Step 1 they’re at their rock bottom, it’s so obvious life is hopeless without help; indeed, they cannot do it without the help of a ‘higher power’.
Until we’ve been there, low enough to give up trying to do things in our own strength, we don’t truly realise how foundational a spiritual step like this is.
When you’re at ground zero — bewildered by the depth of the disastrous pit of where our choices have taken us — there is a twofold experience: spiritual death paradoxically amid the spiritual life that beckons if only we steadily trust God each moment. With each moment out of that kind of hell, the light gets brighter on the horizon.
The only way is up from a rock bottom.
I imagine David feeling closest to God when at his rock bottom, when he fell to his knees in utter desolation praying he would not lose God’s Holy Spirit. It was IN this place that David experienced an absurd, ever replicable reality — God cannot despise a broken and contrite spirit. God comes close to us when we’re down and out!
There, in essence, is the key to the moment’s perfection of humility — as we face the truth of the plight we’re in. This is why life beckons even as we step out of the jaws of spiritual death — out of a reality where the life we’ve led has died.
There’s no better hope in reality than experiencing life rising out of ashes.
The more we practice this life, the more life we practice.
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