The Costly Thing You Don't Want Back

Key Scripture: "...I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." - Galatians 2:20 NIV

You let go of something recently and you keep waiting to miss it. Maybe it was a habit that used to structure your evenings. Maybe it was the way you measured whether a week was successful. Maybe it was a relationship you held onto mostly because letting go felt like failing. Whatever it was, you expected the absence to ache. And the strange part is, it doesn't. Not the way you thought it would.

Paul, who wrote most of the letters to the early churches in the New Testament, described it this way, "...I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). That sounds dramatic until you realize it might be describing something quieter than it sounds. Maybe it looks more like the moment you notice the old version of yourself is no longer the loudest voice in your head. You didn't announce a transformation. You just woke up one morning and the thing that used to drive you no longer held you the same way, and what replaced it felt steadier than anything you had been holding onto before.

And yet something was genuinely lost in the exchange. The comfort of control, the shape of ambition that always had your name at the center, the ability to keep people at a safe distance. Those were real things. The Bible is full of people who clung to what they knew because they couldn't picture what God was offering. Some had to be healed before they understood what health felt like, and others had to leave everything familiar before they discovered where home actually was. A father once stood in front of Jesus and said, "...I do believe, help me overcome my unbelief" (Mark 9:24). Maybe that is closer to where you have been. Believing enough to loosen your grip but honest enough to admit the letting go still frightens you. And yet Jesus said, "...whoever loses their life for me will find it" (John 12:25).

Paul also wrote, "...what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal" (2 Corinthians 4:18). Maybe the reason the loss doesn't ache is that what you gave up was never built to last. King Solomon, known as the wisest ruler in Israel's history, observed that God, "...has also set eternity in the human heart" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Something in you was always reaching past the temporary, and maybe that reaching is the truest thing about you. The trade was real and the cost was honest. But what came in to fill the space is more solid than what left. You are not grieving what you released. You are standing in what replaced it. This is new life!

Prayer

God, the old life cost us less than we thought. What You placed in its absence is more than we expected. We are not looking back. Teach us to trust the trade. Amen.