This Is Your Life

This Is Your Life

My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd sacrifices his life for the sheep.

John 10:10

When we were in graduate school, we heard a speaker named Tim Hansel. Tim had a remarkable life story, and after hearing him talk, we came to admire his ministry as well as his books. In his book Holy Sweat, Tim tells the apocryphal story of a man who never really understood what it meant to live a fulfilled life. The man thought he could live his life best by avoiding any encounters that could lead to hurt and hardship. While the man saw people being loving toward one another, he also saw that they had to exert a lot of effort and that love put strenuous demands on them. He witnessed arguments between people who were trying to love each other. He saw that love required sacrifice and self-denial. He saw it bring disappointment, pain, and even death. The man decided that loving others was simply not worth all the disappointment and pain that doing so entailed. Love cost too much.

He decided that serving others and giving money to the poor and helpless made little sense because all the giving and serving didn’t seem to eliminate the need. Not only that, but some people were not appreciative. So serving others was not for him. He didn’t want his life contaminated and dirtied by such efforts. When the man died, he came to God and presented him with his life. Undiminished, unmarred, and unsoiled, it was clean from the filth of the world, and he presented it proudly to the mighty God, saying, “This is my life.” And God said, “What life?”^a

Too often we come to reason that if we are living really good lives, we won’t encounter pain and hurt. We think our relationships and our lives shouldn’t be so demanding and sacrificial. We think we shouldn’t have to deny our own needs so often through compromise. This kind of thinking lays us open to the disillusionment experienced by the man in the story above. But when we realize that pain is the risk we run—and all too often the price we pay—along the way to the truly abundant life of love, what we should also realize is that the reward is worth the risk.

Take a moment to thank your spouse for the sacrifices he or she has made for you and for your marriage. And what about what you’ve given? Are you holding back in any area because of fear? Reflect on a time when you received great “gain” as a result of a little “pain,” and think about how you might do that again today.

We want to live forever for the same reason that we want to live tomorrow. Why do we want to live tomorrow? It is because there is someone who loves you, and whom you want to see tomorrow, and be with, and love back.

—Henry Drummond

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