Romans 12:1-2

I am going to pick this one up because there is no one else to yet.

This passage is about being a living sacrifice, to live by dying. weird. I actually find it much harder to live by dying that just dying for a cause because it requires dying daily (which is way more than most people have to die). I guess the thing that moves me most about this passage is that I will never know what God wants for my life until I have given my selfishness away. Until I am a sacrifice, I will never see God's will. The mind blower is that it makes perfect sense, because why would God tell me what He wants from me unless he knew I was going to do everything to make it happen? It does not benefit anyone for him to tell rebellious, selfish people about how the world should be.

I would also like to share an experience I just had. When I went up to Vancouver with Matt, we stopped by one of my relatives' houses. He was a pastor and it was an amazing time to get to learn from everything he had been through in his 70 years on the earth. He also gave me some genealogy stuff that he thought I would find interesting and told me to pass it on to my grandfather as well. So, my grandfather is in town this weekend and while we were hanging out at the football game I remembered about this packet of photocopied stuff. I came back to the house and read some of it afterwards. One of the pieces was a letter from my great grandfather (my grandpa's dad) to one of his grand kids about his mother and father. This is a letter that my grandfather has never yet seen but will see tomorrow when I give it to him.

The part of the letter that struck me was where my great grandfather was writing about looking for his mother's grave site. She had died when he was 12. His consolation for not being able to find it was that he had the hope that he would some day see her in heaven, the place "where there is no more parting." Then, I had the crushingly beautiful thought that he is likely there now, standing with his mother, whom he had been parted from for the last 70 years of his life.

I am praying that the letter has the same profound affect on my grandfather who left what faith he had a long time ago.