LOSING LIFE AND FINDING IT.
By John G. Woolley
“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it.” The rhetoric is abrupt, but there is nothing truer in literature. Whatever airs science puts on about religion, it is modest enough in the presence of Jesus, and He has stated here the fundamental rule of life—not spiritual life; the same principle holds, from a microscopic particle of protoplasm up to the most glorious manhood: give and grow, save and starve. The very first demonstrated fact of biology is that a cell gets its increase by its losses. Take, for instance, a bird’s egg; it is a single cell or spark of life, with some raw materials, and rations for three weeks, walled up in a solid, seamless, irrefragable masonry of limestone. Out of the silence and hopelessness of that imprisonment the infinitesimal fragment yearns to its Author, aye, and is heard or felt. Yearns for what?—Life, more life, liberty, enlargement. And from “the secret place of the Most High” a spirit flies, raps on the doorless sphere, and begins a dialog like this:— “I have come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly.” “Give away what you have!” “Lose your life, to find it later on!” “Times and seasons are in My hands!” “Can I not hold onto the little that I have?” “Wo is me! I can not understand; what shall I do?” “Believe on Me, and thou shalt not perish, but have life.” And the cell divides and gives itself away—half or so; and then again and again it does the like with what is left; and each part that it gives off likewise divides in its turn, and strange, wasteful, foolish doings go on in that cramped little world. But at the close of the third week, crash! goes the shell, and the amoeba of three weeks ago stands amidst the ruins of its prison-house—a golden eagle, with wings and claws and a brain and a nervous system, heart, lungs, alimentary machinery. It “lost” itself in giving, but it has “found” itself—not one cell now, but a billion. The tight, dark shell has gone, and instead of it the circle of the heavens hems it in. Science calls the operation karyo-kinesis—karyon, “a nucleus,” and kineo, “I move.” In what we call spiritual life the same thing is called “Christianity.” The principle is universal. Would you be rich?—Be a giver. Misery is misery. Would you be strong?—Put out your strength. Would you be a thinker?—Publish the thought you have. Society is not a flock but an organism. You are a cell shut in a shell of environment—all but helpless. You can remain as you are—an addle. Hell is addledom. There is a way out, one only. Give, divide, lose your life for Jesus’ sake, for man’s sake, and by and by in a glorified humanity you “shall find it.”—John G. Woolley, in the Voice.