Come Waste Your Life

Come and waste your life.  Throw down your dreams and aspirations and put aside your education. Give up your definitions of comfort and ‘must haves’, put down your diplomas and your degrees.  Give up on your eager desires for big houses and bright days: let them go and leave them where they belong.

Come waste your life.  Come and spend long days in unceasing work. Give yourself to small tasks that remain unseen and unacknowledged. Choose to go where you do not want to go and do what no one else would like to do.  Come and work in the mundane and the ordinary, the plain and the painful: get blisters on your hands and heart; be scarred and scared; be worn down and worn out.

Come waste your life.  Have friends and family perplexed, confused and disappointed that you didn’t do more with your life.  Throw away a good career, good prospects and good ideas.  Put aside the petty and the pretty and embrace the vital and the unattractive.  The car, the house, the boat and holiday home, the large pension and the hopes of easy retirement must all be left behind: they cannot be the goal you strive for.  Wasting your life is not an easy option.

Come waste your life.  Come and put your children’s comfort and education at risk. Come and lose friends for the sake of the life that you choose. Come to the risky and the uncomfortable. Come and have people say they admire you but quietly shake their heads at your choices.  Come and let finance be your last priority. Come and let your clothes be unfashionable and over worn. Come and give of your time and resources in a way that speaks of recklessness.  Come!

Come and waste your life. Come and at the end of life and time have the Great Garbage Collector rake over the ruins and out of the flotsam and jetsam that remains pick out the gold and silver, the diamonds and the sapphires, and build a home of the rubbish life you have lived.  Therein you will find reward and gain that will not be taken. There you will have reward beyond pension and reputation.  There you will know joy from loss and sorrow.  There and there alone is hope, dreams, wisdom, truth and beauty, rest and restoration, healing and fullness. All of the things that you have wasted now – you’ll discover their true value there: in Him.

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.

Matthew 16:24-27