unlearning, letting go, surrendering, serving others, and not the language of self-development—which often lurks behind our popular notions of "salvation.

Authentic Christianity is not so much a belief system as a life-and-death system that shows you how to give away your life, how to give away your love, and eventually how to give away your death. Basically, how to give away—and in doing so, to connect with the world, with all other creatures, and with God.

do not find our own Center; it finds us. The body is in the soul. It is both the place of contact and the place of surrender.

Surrender . . .sacrificing my life or suffering in order to change what needs to be changed

Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self.

Surrender doesn't obstruct power; it enhances it.

You are here to enrich the world and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

The principles of gain through loss, of joy through sorrow, of getting by giving, of fulfillment by laying down, of life out of death is what the Bible teaches, and the people who have believed it enough to live it out in simple, humble, day-by-day practice are people who have found the gain, the joy, the getting, the fulfillment, the life.

The world looks for happiness through self-assertion. The Christian knows that joy is found in self-abandonment. 'If a man will let himself be lost for My sake,' Jesus said, 'he will find his true self.

All the Scriptural metaphors about the death of the seed that falls into the ground, about losing one's life, about becoming the least in the kingdom, about the world's passing away—all these go on to something unspeakably better and more glorious. Loss and death are only the preludes to gain and life. It was a temptation to foreshorten the promises, to look for some prompt fulfillment of the loss-gain principle….

I reminded Jim of what we both knew it might mean if he went. "Well, if that's the way God wants it to be," was his calm reply. "I'm ready to die for the salvation of the Aucas." While still a student in college Jim had written: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

A martyr can never cooperate with death, go to death in a way that they're not trying to escape.