The Back Page | Philip Yancey: Getting a Life
The most fully alive persons are those who give their lives away.
Philip Yancey | posted 10/23/2000 12:00AM
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Paradoxically, the life-givers I have known seem most abundant with life themselves. Buechner restates the paradox first articulated by Jesus, that the most fully alive persons demonstrate it by giving away that life:
Inspection stickers used to have printed on the back 'Drive carefully—the life you save may be your own.' That is the wisdom of men in a nutshell. What God says, on the other hand, is 'The life you save is the life you lose.' In other words, the life you clutch, hoard, guard, and play safe with is in the end a life worth little to anybody, including yourself; and only a life given away for love's sake is a life worth living. To bring his point home, God shows us a man who gave his life away to the extent of dying a national disgrace without a penny in the bank or a friend to his name. In terms of men's wisdom, he was a perfect fool, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without making something like the same kind of fool of himself is laboring under not a cross but a delusion.
Related Elsewhere
Read more about the life of
St. John of the Cross,
St. Bernard, or
Madame Guyon.
Or study Buechner's favorites
St. Brendan,
St. Godric, or the
biblical Jacob of Genesis 27-29.
Buechner's books
Godric and
Brendan are available from the Christianity Today bookstore.
Other Buechner books include
Listening to Your Life,
Son of Laughter, and
Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale.
To read more about
Jack McConnell's accomplishments link to this short bio from his proud alma mater.
Christianity Today recently ran "Living with Furious Opposites," from Yancey's latest book, Reaching for the Invisible God.
Yancey's columns for Christianity Today include:
To Rise, It Stoops (Aug. 29, 2000)
Lessons from Rock Bottom (July 10, 2000)
Chess Master (May 15, 2000)
Would Jesus Worship Here? (Feb.7, 2000)
Doctor's Orders (Dec. 2, 1999)
Getting to Know Me (Oct. 25,1999)
The Encyclopedia of Theological Ignorance (Sept. 6, 1999)
Writing the Trinity (July 12, 1999)
Can Good Come Out of This Evil? (June 14, 1999)
The Last Deist (Apr. 5, 1999)
Why I Can Feel Your Pain (Feb. 8, 1999)
What The Prince of Egypt Won't Tell You (Dec. 7, 1998)
What's a Heaven For? (Oct. 26,1998)
The Fox and the Writer (Sept. 7,1998)
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