Your Life Forever

Live your life, and live forever. That is the promise. Your life. Not mine, or your neighbor's, or that of your priest, or the Pope. Not even that of Jesus Christ.

Live your life forever.

Do you think your life is not good enough? Do you think God made you as a joke? Wrong. He made you as you are to live your life, and in the name of Jesus Christ you will have eternal life.

So get used to being who you are. You have a long way to go.

Now, I understand the temptation to be someone else, the allure of saintliness. The desire to put one's self aside. I know all this and I have practiced this. And in doing so, I have become reacquainted with who I am and learned to accept who I am the better to live my life.

But Christianity is not a matter of mere training to live. We are directed to go forth and preach the good news in word and deed. How will you do this unless you first accept who you are?

All you are, so-called strengths and weakness, must be lived in prayer and service. All for others, in service, yes - but be sure you accept who you are as you serve. Give of yourself, not in imitation of another.

Do not serve in order to escape who you are.

Think of the saints, those strong-willed men and women, many with patchwork lives, redeemed in service. But you will not have life unless you are willing to offer the life God gave you.

Husband or wife, son or daughter. Priest or parishioner. Doctor, vagrant, street car conductor. Artist, baker, student, law maker. These are roles - not who you are or who I am, in our hearts, as God made us. Be true to you, your conscience. Live the arc, the full narrative, the entire passage. Live your life.

Whether or not - fill in the blank. Whether or not you preach, pray, hope, curse, love or live in fear. Live out your life, as God hopes you will, the life given that you might have eternal life.

Live now that you might live forever. Do not be a hypocrite, making of yourself a paper angel. Follow your thoughts to their conclusion. Live in that truth that you might live forever.

Deny the Holy Spirit - your conscience - at the peril of eternity. To lose eternity, promised, simply by losing yourself, God's gift.

In mirror aspect of the sacrifice of his only begotten son, our Lord, live your life as it was given you. Take God into you, as the Holy Spirit holds your heart, and live your life. Forever.

Amen.