hold onto your hats - part one

i am about to do something a bit risky. i am going to post a long quote. and i know a lot of times i don't read long blog posts - but i can assure you that this is a life changer. i was bored one day in the kent state library and came upon this and i still am challenged by it a few years later. this quote is from a book entitled No Rusty Swords by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

'BETTER THAN LIFE ITSELF'

'For thy goodness is better than life' (Psalm 63 v.3).

Two and a half millennia have now passed since the ancient Jewish saint, far from Jerusalem and his homeland, devoured by misery in body and soul, surrounded by mockers and enemies of his God, pondered the strange and wonderful ways God had led him. It was not easy, peaceful meditation. It was a struggle, on the brink of despair, a struggle for meaning in life, a struggle for faith in God. The pillars of life had crumbled away. Where he expected to find a firm foothold, he found nothing but emptiness. 'God, where art thou? God, who am I? My life falls crashing down into the bottomless abyss. God, I am afraid, where is they goodness? And yet, thou art my God and they goodness is better than life.' Those are his words. And when they are understood, they set a man free again.

The words of this text, 'Thy goodness is better than life', seem to shine gently, but inwardly they are hard words. These words are full of passion conceived in the conflict of two worlds, the world of the Bible in conflict with our own . . .

. . . At some point in our Psalmist's life something quite decisive happened: God came into his life. From that moment his life was changed. I don't mean that suddenly he became good and pious - it may well be that he was that before God came. But now God had come and had drawn near to him, and that fact alone made his life remarkable. It completely tore him apart. We so often hear and say that religion make men happy and harmonious and peaceful and content. Maybe that's true of religion; but it is not true of God and his dealing with men. It is utterly wrong. That is what the Psalmist discovered. Something had burst open inside him, he was divided by the struggle burning within him, which every day became more and more heated and terrible. From hour to hour, he came to feel that his old beliefs were being torn from him. He struggled desperately to hold on to them; but God had taken them from him and would never give them back. As God conquers him, he resists the more firmly and desperately, holding on to what is left; bu the more firmly he holds on to what he has, the harder must God strike to break it free and the more it hurts when it is torn away. And so the breathless struggle goes on, with God the victor and man defeated; he no longer knows where it will all lead to and he sees that he is lost; he does not know whether he hates or loves the one who has forced his way so violently into his life and destroyed his peace. He struggles for every inch and in despair yields to the weapons of God. And his position would not be quite so hopeless were it not for the fact that God's weapons are so strange and wonderful, that they cast down and lift up, that they wound and yet heal, that they kill and yet bring life; God speaks: 'If you want my mercy, they let me have victory over you; if you want my life, then let me hate and destroy that which is evil in you; if you want my goodness, then let me take your life.' And now comes the final struggle. Everything has been surrendered up and only one thing has been left to the man, which he is determined to hold on to: his life. Still God will not call a halt, but storms this last citadel of all. And so the battle rages on for the last thing which he has; the man defends himself like a madman, God cannot want this, God is not cruel, God is good and kind. And yet the answer comes back: ' If you want my goodness then give me the last thing that you have, give me your life. Now choose!'