petals,
leaving the golden crown free to float away when God's time comes.

Have we learned the buttercup's lesson yet? Are our hands off the
very blossom of our life? Are all things--even the treasures that He
has sanctified--held loosely, ready to be parted with, without a
struggle, when He asks for them?

It is not in the partial relaxing of grasp, with power to take back
again, that this fresh victory of death is won: it is won when that
very power of taking back is yielded; when our hands, like the little
calyx hands of God's buttercups, are not only taken off, but folded
behind our back in utter abandonment. Death means a loosened
grasp--loosened beyond all power of grasping again.

And it is no strange thing that happens to us, if God takes us at our
word, and strips us for a while of all that made life beautiful. It
may be outward things--bodily comfort, leisure, culture, reputation,
friendships--that have to drift away as our hands refuse to clasp on
anything but God's will for us. Or it may be on our inner life that
the stripping falls, and we have to leave the sunny lands of
spiritual enjoyment for one after another of temptation's
battlefields, where every inch of our foothold has to be tested,
where even, it may seem to give way--till no experience, no
resting-place remains to us in heaven or earth but God Himself--till
we are "wrecked upon God."

Have faith, like the flowers, to let the old things go. Earn His
beatitude, His "Blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in
Me"--"the beatitude of the trusting," as it has well been
called--even if you have to earn it like John the Baptist in an hour
of desolation. You have told Him that you want Him only. Are you
ready to ratify the words when His emptying begins to come? Is God
enough? Is it still "My God" that you cry, even as Jesus cried when
nothing else was left Him?

Yes, practical death with Him to lawful things is just letting go,
even as He on the Cross let go all but God. It is not to be reached
by struggling for it, but simply by yielding as the body yields at
last to the physical death that lays hold on it--as the dying calyx
yields its flower. Only to no iron law with its merciless grasp do we
let ourselves go, but into the hands of the Father: it is there that
our spirit falls, as we are made conformable unto the death of Jesus.

Does all this seem hard? Does any soul, young in this life and in
that to come, shrink back and say "I wo