" In our eagerness to live, we sometimes forget that first we must die. To become Christians, we die with Christ, one time. We accept his death as the punishment our sins deserve. Most of us understand that. But to grow as Christians, we must die to the flesh, repeatedly, daily, until we’re home. At different times, the Spirit takes us through special seasons of accelerated dying, when the pain is especially acute. Following the lead of St. John of the Cross, we aptly call these seasons “dark nights of the soul”. Its that death to ourselves that we’re more likely to forget or trivialize. But when we do, when we think about it only a little or assume it means nothing more than staying out of pornography shops or cutting back on gossip, we lost the power to connect. Both deaths, Christ’s death for our sin and our death to our sin, are difficult, Christ’s immeasurably more so because He suffered absolute isolation from God so we would never have to…Our death to the flesh is entirely different. We die a death that grace enables, a death that disconnects us only from what is bad in or to connect us with everything good. "