"The Promise of Paradox"

"Then Jesus told his disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." (Matthew 16.24-25)
How can this be? How can you save your life by losing it? Or lose your life by saving it? It's really not as strange as it sounds at first. I have known people who find true life by giving it away in service to others. Likewise, I have known people who focus only on themselves in an attempt to save their lives. They only care for themselves, spending all their resources and time on themselves. In their attempt to selfishly save their lives, they lose them.
This is what Parker Palmer is talking about in "The Promise of Paradox." He writes, "The dictionary defines a paradox as 'a statement that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.' Neils Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, says . . .'the opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.'" Palmer sites Thomas Merton, the great Trappist Monk Spiritual writer, in another place, "I have become convinced that the very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me; if only because someone so complicated and so prone to confusion and self-defeat could hardly survive for long without special mercy." And Palmer writes "God has called us, lost in contradictions, we will be swallowed by grace and find ourselves . . . traveling toward our destiny in the belly of a paradox."
As followers of Christ, paradoxes should be no strangers to us: in death, we find resurrection. As we pass through the darkness of this world, we find light in Christ. If we focus only on ourselves, selfishly trying to save our lives, we lose them. But in losing our lives in service to God and others, we find true life!