If the Job Goes, I Do Not Know Who Is Left

A man told me the sentence he cannot get past is not about money and it is not about his family.

It is: if the job goes, I do not know who is left.

He is not being self pitying. He said it as a piece of information about himself, the way you would report a fact about your own house. He has been the thing he does since he was twenty six. Every room he walks into, he is that. Every introduction, every conversation with a stranger on a plane, every idea he has about what he is worth.

And the decision in front of him puts the job at risk, and the money is not what is stopping him.

I know that exactly. I was a man who did a thing on a stage, and when the thing stopped I discovered that I did not have a second sentence about myself, and that the year I spent finding one was the hardest and most useful year of my life.

There is an instruction of Jesus about this that has one word in it that most people skip.

The word is daily

Here is the verse.

And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. (Luke 9:23, King James Version)

Daily.

Luke is the only one who includes it, and it changes the shape of the instruction entirely. It is not a single act of demolition performed once at a conversion. It is a maintenance instruction, repeated, on an ordinary schedule.

Which is a mercy for a man in his position. He has been imagining one enormous moment in which he stops being what he is and becomes something unknown, and that is terrifying and nobody could do it.

What is described is smaller and repeated. Something set down today, and then again tomorrow, and the identity underneath assembled over a long period rather than swapped in an afternoon.

You are given a daily instruction rather than a single demolition. Luke 9:23 puts daily into the sentence where the other accounts do not. It is the same Spirit, Titus 3:5 named in the renewing of the Holy Ghost, who does the assembling that no single act accomplishes.

The next verse is a sentence about finding

The line immediately after is the one that answers his actual question.

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. (Luke 9:24)

The same shall save it.

There are two people in that sentence and they are the same man. The one who loses and the one who is saved are not different individuals, which means the losing is not annihilation.

That is what he is afraid of. He thinks if the job goes there is nobody underneath, and the verse says there is somebody, and that the somebody is the one who comes out of it.

I can tell you from the other side of a year in an apartment over a restaurant that there was somebody underneath, and that I had never met him, and that I would not have gone looking on my own.

You are the same person on the other side of it, and the verse says so in its grammar. Luke 9:24 has the losing and the saving happening to one man rather than two, and it is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:16 bearing witness with our spirit, who tells a person who they are when a job stops answering.

Paul writes a profit and loss on his own resume

Paul had an identity built out of exactly this kind of material, and he lists it.

But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. (Philippians 3:7)

Read the previous verses. He lists his lineage, his training, his sect, his conduct, his zeal. It is a resume, and it is a good one, and it was the whole of how he described himself.

Those I counted loss. He does not say they were worthless. He says he reclassified them, which is an accounting act, and the things stayed exactly what they were.

And notice that he still lists them. He writes the resume out in full in the letter. A man who had genuinely erased his history would not be able to. He kept the material and moved it into a different column.

You are able to move a resume into a different column without erasing it. Philippians 3:7 says what things were gain to me, those I counted loss, which is a reclassification rather than a deletion. It is His Spirit, Romans 8:14 leading the sons of God, who supplies a new heading a person cannot invent.

And if the sentence about who is left has begun to sit on you at night, say it out loud to a person: a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. A man who cannot find himself outside a job title is standing on something narrower than he thinks, and that is worth saying to somebody before the job decides the timing.

Where Paul says the actual life is kept

There is a line in Colossians that says where the thing is stored, and it is a strange sentence.

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3)

Hid with Christ in God. It is a storage claim. The life being described is not held in the place a person would look for it and is not held by them.

Which means it cannot be taken by an employer, a market, a client list or a bad year, because none of those have access to where it is kept.

And Galatians puts it as a swap of the whole subject:

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. (Galatians 2:20)

Nevertheless I live. He does not disappear in that sentence. He is still there, still writing, still using the word I four times in one verse.

That is the answer to who is left. Somebody is left. He is described as living, and the source of the living has moved.

You have a life stored somewhere no employer has access to. Colossians 3:3 says your life is hid with Christ in God. It is the Holy Spirit, Ephesians 1:13 sealing us until the redemption of the purchased possession, who is named as the seal on where it is kept.