Thoughts over dinner:
The NIV translates this familiar passage like this:
24 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. 25 What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self? Lk 9:24–25.
This is more accurate to the Hebrew way of thinking. They knew, of course, about the immaterial part of our essence, but the word in Hebrew translated “soul” means our very self, our personhood, our whole being. In Greek, that word is “psyche” (used in Matthew 16); in Luke, the apostle simple says, “loses himself”.
I think that is what Jesus was getting at.
As the disciples would be heading into the world and preaching the gospel, there will always be the temptation to speak what everyone expects them to speak.
To speak the truth often meant being cast out of your community, your synagogue, your guild. You lost your family, your friends, your church, your livelihood. And so many, like the parents of the man born blind (John 9) didn’t speak at all because they were afraid.
But the consequence is this: eventually you lose yourself.
I had lost myself. But then I stopped being afraid and began to speak. And I lost friends, family, my culture, my denomination. But I found myself.
And it is wonderful. The Lord has lifted me out of a miry pit and set me on firm ground. The Lord took me out of a narrow place and set me in a wide place.
So now I am me. In a wide place, on firm ground, I can leap; I can dance. I can praise. I can be myself.
In the mud and the narrowness, everyone is afraid of losing their place and they can’t even imagine life outside the mud. They have their things and everything stays the same, but they lose themselves.
It is far better to have yourself and God created you, even if that means the loss of everything else.
Anything or anyone that insists that you stay captive in the narrow, mire-filled pit, isn’t worth holding on to anyway.
Save yourself by being brave enough to risk losing everything to find yourself. It is worth it. And Jesus walks with you there, in the wide pastures, by the still waters. And those still in the mud will be sure that you are doing something wrong, because they are so afraid of finding themselves that they don’t dare ask to be set free.
My Only Comfort 