Hey! I'm Dying Here ...

Sometimes it’s good to read Bible commentaries where the author goes back to the oldest language translations. Literal word-by-word translations into English often don’t really tell the intent of the original writer, and you need a much broader commentary in English to understand what was REALLY being said. Sometimes the English language just doesn’t have words with subtle enough meanings. So I was interested when I read, this morning, about a word which DOES have a nice subtlety in English.

When speaking about death, in English we can say that we are killing someone, or someone is killing us. But the word dying is a much more personal word. We can say we are dying, but we can’t say someone is dying us (unless they’re changing our color!). Interesting. Dying is something only we can do; it’s a very personal thing, and the word really conveys it well.

And the word can be used not only to apply to our physical life.

We can die to our physical life, or we can die to our way of life. And in both cases, we’re the ones effecting the change. We can die to a former way of living, and no one can do it for us. Even our language recognizes this. When we seem stuck in a rut, only WE can die to that condition, if we care to.

Most people think of Jesus as having stated two great commandments: Love God, and Love Neighbor. They’re wrong. Jesus stated THREE great commandments: Love God, Love Neighbor, and Love Self. The last one was so obvious that Jesus mentioned it only in passing, but it is no less important. “We” are what our life is all about. The three love commandments are like a 3-legged stool; for us to not fall over, all three need to be there, and all three support each other. We need to grow in holiness throughout our life, and an increase in all three of the loves are a measure of our progress. It’s kind of the stool we stand on to reach up to heaven.

We often forget to love ourselves, and life becomes all that much harder to live. We often do struggle to love God and neighbor, but don’t struggle to treat ourselves very well. And we are ALL worth loving. Yes, even you.

You need to die to some of those ways in which you are not loving yourself. You need to start to do caring things for yourself: your health, your education, your leisure, and your mental well-being -- and you will be in a better position to hold up your leg of the stool, AND to love your God and your neighbor.

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost, day by passing day, in every small, uncaring way.
- Bishop Fulton J. Sheen