We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Love is a Beautiful Way to Live…and Die
Hartwig HKD via Compfight
Richard Beck posted a reflection this last week called Love is the Allocation of Our Living and Dying. Greg has a regular practice of imagining his own death in order to live rightly while he’s alive. In this reflection, Richard discusses the idea of “giving our lives away” and what that really means.
From Richard’s blog:
Life is a finite resource always slipping away. Every minute that passes is a passing of life, a movement toward death. Every moment we are being expended and used up.
But we have some choices in how we are expended. We can allocate our dying. We can specify the times and places of our dying.
My point here is that, because life is a finite resource, giving ourselves to others is a very real sort of sacrifice. It’s not suicidal or dysfunctional, but it is sort of martyrological in that I am literally dying the minutes I spend with you. To be with you–to love you–is to die a little bit. A sacrificial giving of my life to you.
Category: General
Tags: Death, Kingdom Living, Richard Beck, Sacrifice
Related Reading
Ignorance is Not Bliss
We’ve been talking a lot here lately about reason and truth and science and how that intersects with faith. It’s been ruffling a few feathers to say the least. It’s sometimes hard to stay engaged. It’s easier to just check out. But this is precisely what we must not do. Here’s a blog post from…
Podcast: Dear Greg: My Friend Committed Suicide. Should I Pray for Her Soul?
When does our story end? Greg talks about suicide and praying for the dead. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0414.mp3
Enemy Love
Rob Hogeslag via Compfight Zack Hunt over at The American Jesus shared the story of Paul Keane who offered his own burial plot to Tamerlan Tsarnaev if his family could not find a cemetery that would accept his body. You’ll remember that Tsarnaev was one of the men who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings and…
How Are We To Love the Soldiers of ISIS?
Over the last several weeks I’ve received some form of this question almost every day. In some cases the question is asked rhetorically, as though the very question exposes the absurdity of suggesting we are to love this terroristic group. Other times the question is asked with a pragmatic twist. One person recently said to…
The Kingdom of God While Mowing the Lawn
The Kingdom of God is first and foremost characterized by the kind of love Jesus demonstrated on Calvary and throughout his life. Everything we do, Paul says, is to be done in love (1 Cor. 16:14). Love is the only thing that ultimately matters (Gal. 5:6; cf. I Cor. 13:1-3). As our lives become a…
Love Conquers All
Paul prayed in this way for the church at Ephesus: I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, [God] may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in…