Giving It Up To Gain It For Real

I'm reading Søren Kierkegaard (kierkegaard means "graveyard" or "church/kirk yard"), the inventor of existential angst ("Why am I here?  What is the purpose in my being given this life?").  I read a bit about him first.  Turns out that Kierkegaard was a 19th century Danish philosopher/Christian. He was born into a fairly pre-determined, comfortable, uneventful, boring life. The most interesting thing he did was write things which attacked the Christian culture in which he grew up.  He felt he had to deal with the following:

-everyone born into his culture was simply assumed to be Christian, just by being born into it, and you didn't have to be part of anything that might change you or make you grow,
-being Christian in a given week merely involved going to church and listening to people say things that were quite abstracted from anything real that the people might personally be actually wrestling with,
-"thinking" in a Christian way, in his culture, merely involved that aforementioned passive listening to sermons or lectures and saying you mostly believed whatever was said, as your culture by now had it all figured out, (And it was easy.  You'd been told that it was all very certain, it was sure, and there was a guarantee being offered you that it would work out well.)
-He felt if he became simply yet another preacher, he'd not actually be changing anything, but he'd only be adding to the din, and people would still never think or feel or believe personally and inwardly, and at most would only listen to him and decide they outwardly believed everything he said, (there were enough preachers, he felt, and they weren't doing much good),
-so he decided to convey various extreme, not-good-enough viewpoints on issues by writing things under various pseudonyms.  This means he wrote as various made up characters and had them disagree passionately as they overstated different incompatible sides of issues.  He hoped then no one could possibly simply passively agree with any of the viewpoints, but that the readers would have to sort through it all personally, because it wasn't "prepackaged" and ready for them to claim to believe.  He meant it to retain both the nuances of the issues, and also was making clear what made it so dubious to oversimplify and take a hard line on things,
-he felt that genuine faith was almost impossible to find in his culture, because everyone was being handed a substitute for the individual, hard-won, inward journey that he felt genuine faith has to be.  He felt impersonal, easy faith is quickly revealed to simply not run deep enough to do much of anything genuine, and therefore does not work in any real sense, on the personal, nor at the community level,
-Kierkegaard believed that faith was about making a very difficult "leap," (he coined that phrase "leap of faith," but meant something other than merely believing something wild sounding) which involved being willing to risk/give up everything you have been handed freely, with the specific intent to get it all back and then truly "have it" in a way you had not formally.  So, what had been easy lip service, or mere assent to ideas before, has now been risked and pretty much lost, and is then won back in a more personal, individual, genuine way.  Essentially, "It only looks like you have it, as you were given it.  To really have it, you must give it up for/to God and then, even harder, win it back personally, for real," (he used the story of Abraham giving up Isaac, his future hope, and then receiving him again with joy, because God gave Isaac back to him).  There are also bible verses about he that wants to keep his life will lose it, and he that is willing to give his life will save it,
-so he only really believed, trust, admired and respected Christians for whom their Christianity was a hard-won inner battle, because that was the only kind of Christianity he believed was genuine,
-he "gave up" the woman he loved, so as to "get" her (and an understanding of women, as well as the male/female dynamic) in a deeper way.  This did not work out, really.  He died alone and his understanding of women is idealized and abstracted from any actual, real, flesh and blood women as a result,
-he felt that people like Abraham or Moses weren't preachers, but were live-ers.  They did not leave us books of religious thought, but rather, their actual lives, with the nigh-impossible situations and decisions that faced them, and what happened when they chose poorly or well.
-he felt that Christians are judged, not on what they point to as their prepackaged set of beliefs, but on who they spend their lives becoming.  He felt that Christian existence involves becoming someone individual (through balancing what is ultimately wholly uncertain outwardly, yet which you are nonetheless passionately pursuing inwardly without that outward guarantee that it will work), become your self, and then if/when God calls you to do something, because He needs a specific person to do it, you will have become someone, and will be able to simply say "Here I am." (send me)