Play Possum

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.
Lk.9:23

What is Jesus saying it takes to follow him and live? Death.

The expression "Take up your cross" is often taken to mean pick up your burden. I don't think Jesus' audience would have heard it that way. They knew all about the cross. It was a ghastly instrument of torture and death deliberately stationed outside the city walls for them to see. 

Jesus is saying to me, "Mike, put to death your old man of self-centered obsessions and compulsions. Be born anew and live, come follow me. Then do it again tomorrow and the day after that."

Jesus seems to underscore this by adding in the following verse that "Everyone who loses his life will save it."

This reminds me of a great scene in the animated movie, Over The Hedge, where the daughter is embarrassed by her dad's constant pretending to be dead when threatened;

DAUGHTER: Isn't playing dead a little... weak?
DAD:              Heather, how many times must I say it? Playing possum is what we do. We die so that we live!

I'm going to play possum this Lent... daily.