Die Everyday

For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection.  Romans 6:7

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I write on a blank page of my diary, “I am dead.”   It’s oddly comforting.

Dying is not such a bad thing if it is the death of bad things in me.  If I get to lose the evil stepmother in me and replace it with wonderful traits I desire, I want to die everyday, and more often.

Because I know, even being a Christian, I do many things I should not do.  It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one.  Confessing and believing one thing and practicing another makes you a hypocrite.  It’s not just politicians who do that.  Even apostle Paul struggled with the same problem.

I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate… for the wishing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not.  6:15, 18

Perhaps that is why many Christians have been accused of being hypocrites.  But, I won’t despair.  While it is true that my mind is a battleground, it is not a hopeless battle… a constant trip back and forth between good and evil without one side winning over the other as Herman Hesse described in his book Demian.  In this book, he idealized the harmonious union of all that is good and evil in the world.

I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely the artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil.  Herman Hesse

I’d rather not accept the evil in me as being an equal partner of what is good in me.  Unless I am convinced that that has to be the case.  If we’re meant to be passive containers of good and evil elements, why do we struggle?  Why do we tell so many stories, both fiction and non-fiction, fairy tales, novels, movies, news etc. to ourselves from the perspective of good and evil?

Are we to accept the state in which we were born along with genetic predispositions to determine the kind of person each of us will turn out to be?  Are we that passive and helpless?  Well, too late for me to believe that.  I see too many examples telling me differently.  Paul for example.  I’ve experienced some too.   Alone, our struggles may be futile indeed.  With Holy Spirit, we are not stuck.  We can go somewhere.  I  can become more righteous than me of yesterday.

So I  die now.  For I want to live happily ever after.   The happy ending to so many stories we tell and love to hear.