Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

 

Matthew 19: 16-26

Don’t Walk Away From Jesus, but if You Do, He Still Looks at You and Loves You

 

It’s a beautiful offer: Come follow Jesus on a life of divine

guidance on faith-challenging and exciting adventures.

 

Chasing ambitions, strutting our stuff exhausts us, but the excitements of

knowing the ever-fresh, surprising Jesus—those are inexhaustible. That’s the

magic part. Success, making money—that ego-driven slog is the boring part!

 

There is a cost to following Jesus, of course. We have to

move in the direction he moves, and do what he tells us to.

 

While he was on earth, Christ was active, energetic, roaming

through Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Following him will

mean movement and challenge. But we can’t walk behind him

laden with suitcases and backpacks stuffed with our treasures.

 

What would you reject Jesus’s micro-calls on your life for?

That is the idol that currently grips and possesses you.

 

I hear him tell me to become fitter, declutter my house,

and then move. And when I neglect these imperatives,

an idol has taken priority: my podcast and writing, alas.

So, I must surrender daily, balancing Jesus’s call to

health and peaceful housekeeping with the call to write.

 

What do you hear him calling you to sacrifice to follow

him? Do it. Don’t go away grieving. Nothing is worth

the sadness, the second-bestness, of not choosing Jesus.

 

I have decided to follow Jesus. But I waver. But for us, who

struggle to relinquish our idols of glory, achievement, whatever,

but still yearn for the peace of Jesus, there is yet mercy. Jesus

says a camel can more easily squeeze through the eye of a needle

than the treasure-burdened experience God’s peaceable

kingdom, but adds that “With God, all things are possible.”

 

So even we, conditioned from youth to strive, to achieve and succeed,

Can still, in fits and snatches, find our spirits singing on a walk or

during worship in church, or find our hearts strangely warmed by

Scripture, and, sometimes, even “see” Christ stand before us.

 

Christ looks at us, Christ loves us, and says, “With God, all things

are possible,” even we, the flawed, entering his beautiful Kingdom.

Thank you, Jesus.