Sometimes you stay because you want to.

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?"

. . . From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

"You do not want to leave too, do you?" Jesus asked the Twelve.

Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God."

Sometimes I feel like that. Sometimes it's like everything is just too hard and too ridiculous and I can't believe you would really say that, think that, demand that of me. But it's like you dare me to leave. I'm reminded that nobody's physically keeping me here. And like Peter I'm forced to break down and admit it: I've got nowhere else to go. I know what life is really about and I know what truth is and I know who has the key to life, and I can't pretend like I don't.

Sometimes we stay because we want to. And sometimes we stay because we've got to. It's unromantic but it's how most long-term relationships work at one point or another. It's question of investment. This one most of all because it's literally a matter of life and death. Some people would rather choose death than live as a slave. Personally, I'm a sellout. I would rather live as a slave than die with the freedom to try to make myself happy.

Because I know too much. I know that in the end, I'd never make myself happy and I'd be a slave anyway - to myself or something else, it doesn't matter, I'd be trapped by something or someone that's going to fail me, that's going to die. Whereas if I choose now to be a slave and to imitate you instead of 'being true to myself,' I end up with not meager existence but abundant life and freedom and a truer, happier self than self-enslaved minds can imagine.

So I'm where I am in life because I want to be. But I'm also here because you want me to be. And in the small, small-minded, dimly-lit hours when hope and imagination are left unconscious, I'm here because I have to be.

Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.

That is so bizarre, so counterintuitive, so backwards. But what else is there? Where else am I going to go?

(These are what we call rhetorical questions.)