"Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life."
John 12:24-25

The gospels are full of agricultural images. It's a little funny for those of us who have grown up making weekly trips to the grocery store -- we rarely give much thought to where are food comes from, and we don't spend much time pondering what's involved in growing grains or vegetables or anything else.

I wonder, sometimes, what images Jesus might use with you and me. It's kind of hard to imagine cell phones or iPods or the web or SUVs as the basis for a parable. But who knows? I'm sure Jesus would find a way to reach us, too. (The kingdom of heaven is like the man who lost his Palm Pilot, and searched his apartment until he found it...).

Actually, maybe the Palm Pilot can give us an entrance into today's verse. True, it's not quite like the grain. Maybe it's nothing like the grain. But I'm going to risk accusations of mixing metaphors, and follow this idea of a Palm Pilot in the earth.

Okay: Jesus is trying to say that it's when you're willing to lose your life that you save it. Right? Right. So the grain thing makes sense. We associate being buried in the earth with death, but if you bury a seed, it has a chance to grow, and produce new life. If you bury a Palm Pilot, what do you get? A tree full of Palm Pilots for those who can't afford them? Hmm... probably not. You probably get nothing, except a gadget that doesn't work because it's got dirt in its gears, or circuits, or whatever Palm Pilots have.

But what else do you get? A person without his or her Palm Pilot. A person without the thing that keeps him organized. A person who isn't sure where to go, what time her next appointment is, etc. I can remember the last time I lost my calendar. I didn't know what I had to do, or when I had to do it. I couldn't remember what I'd committed myself to do. I felt like I'd lost my life. Ah ha!

Not too long ago, I had the chance to hear a man named Luther Smith speak. He discussed Christian spirituality, and the obstacles to an authentic spiritual life. And at one point, he asked the question: Do you know who you are when you're not busy? It's a great question. When you take yourself away from your routines and commitments, what's left? Who are you?

When Jesus says that you have to lose your life, even hate your life, in order to save it, I don't believe that he's telling all of us to be martyrs. Sadly, sometimes, it comes to that. But I don't think that the point of Christianity is to encourage a bunch of people to die young. No, that's not it at all.

But I think that Jesus knows that we can sometimes get confused about what our life really is. It's easy to think that we're no more than our accomplishments, no more than our jobs or our reputations or whatever. So we cling to our palm pilots, because we forget that we're supposed to organize our schedules, and instead we let our schedules organize us. We worry about classes, or careers, or our next big purchase because we somehow get it into our head that those things make us who we are. We're afraid to fail because we don't want to be failures. We're afraid to lose something because we don't want to be losers. We're afraid to let go of the things we can control -- whatever that might be -- because we don't want to feel like we're letting go of ourselves. But that's just the point.

You see, God created us as God's own children, made in God's image. And who you are as a child of God does not have anything to do with your GPA, or your income, or whether or not your next employer gives you a glowing reference. It's not that those things don't matter; I understand that they do. But they aren't you. Your life is more than that. And I suspect that it's only when we learn to let go of those things that we discover that we were there, all along, and our hearts will keep beating without all the extra baggage.

Don't go burying your Palm Pilots or anything. But try leaving it at home sometime. Try burying it in your closet, along with your cell phone and your date book and your iPod and your laptop and all the stuff that we've come to depend on. Take a long walk. Lose the stuff that seems so necessary, but isn't. Find yourself not a slave to everyone else's expectations, or even your own. Find yourself as a child of God, who doesn't need to be anything else. Maybe that's a way to lose life, in order to find it.