Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Allison. Today's scripture offers us a wiser way of being human as we step into the day.

Some of the most confusing words in scripture are these. Deny yourself and take up your cross.

In fact, today's episode topic comes directly from several of you

who have written into requests topics, and I'm so glad you brought up this one, because it's one

I've thought a lot about. For many of us, those words have been interpreted as a call to disappear,

to ignore our own needs, to silence our emotions, to shrink in relationships, even with God. And if you grew up with

that interpretation, I want you to know you're not alone and you're not wrong that it has caused

harm. And I want to offer a different understanding today, one that I think is both more faithful

to the text and to the teachings of Jesus, and also more aligned with what we know about how

human beings actually heal and grow.

Today's scripture is Mark 8 34 through 36. Then Jesus called the crowd to him along with his

disciples and said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross

and follow me. For whoever wants to save

their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.

What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?

This is one of the most powerful passages in scripture. And before we dive into it, I want to talk about a concept from psychology that is really resonant to what Jesus is saying here. It's actually at the heart of my book, The Best of You. It's the idea of the true self and the false self. Most of us are familiar with the word ego, that part of us that is defended, performing,

managing how we appear to others. But underneath the ego, psychologist describes something

deeper, a true self. It's the place inside that is genuine, spontaneous, and alive. This is what I

think of as the truest version of our god-made selves, the Amago

Day, the image of God within us, the place within us that was created whole before things got

so messed up. And the parts of us that have learned to survive to protect, to function on the

surface, have also gotten disconnected from what I've called that true self, the spirit-led self,

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