What Do We Expect?

June 25, 2017 | What we yearn for in life often seems forever beyond us. You want happiness and it seems one step ahead of you. How about wealth? There always seems to not be enough. Or Security? Just when you think you have it, it’s gone. And love? Ah yes, love especially. We set out to acquire love and all you end up with is a crippling preoccupation with self that holds you back from the fullness of life with others. Yet, strangely enough, when we don’t chase one of these things for its own sake, when we orient our lives elsewhere, what we had been yearning for often arrives anyway. We don’t find happiness, happiness finds us. We don’t grasp love. Love grasps us.
Which brings us to Jesus’ words we heard. “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” But in this reading there is more to it than that. Jesus is being more specific. He is preparing his followers for difficult days ahead.