following jesus

It’s so confusing. We don’t even really know what it means. We could sit down and make out a bulleted list of what following Jesus means, but that really won’t do it, will it? I think this is because following Jesus isn’t a business plan, a logistical graph, a mathematical equation, or a step-by-step, rung-by-rung ascent to successful Christian living. If anything, it is a tumultuous, wild, nerve-wracking, bewildering and unable-to-grasp storm where you don’t know up from down. One moment you’re here, the next moment you’re there. How can we really follow Jesus when it’s not so simple as it really sounds? How can we really follow Jesus when it’s not as ‘neat and tidy’ as the world makes it out to be? Can we grasp the idea that maybe, just maybe, following Jesus is – messy?

I think of following Jesus as a journey. We can try to make a list of what it means to follow Jesus, but it will never be complete. It will always be changing. It will be organic. Culture is changing. The world is changing. Our psychology and sociology is changing. So following Jesus must change, too. Come up with a list, and you’ll be back at it a week later, deleting, adding, re:modifying. Some days we will think we have the perfect route, and hours, days, months and even years later, we will look back and say, “What was I thinking?” And so we start over again. But isn’t that part of the journey?

Following Jesus is a journey because it is a discovery. Sometimes we’ll be strolling through the prairie, under the sunshine. Other times we’ll be hiding under a rock, trying to hide from the rain. We will grunt and grind as we climb the mountains, our hearts will flutter as we hang one-handed from a cliff. We will taste the sweetness of honey and berries, and also the bitterness of dust in our mouths and sand in our shoes. Sometimes we will feel like the most blessed people on earth, sometimes like the most cursed. Sometimes we will want to keep pushing ‘til the end. Sometimes we will want to give up.

More than once we’ll just sit down for a day or two to relax, gather our thoughts, our strength, and then we will continue the journey. Unexpected things come up: forks in the road, dead-end trails. Half the time we really won’t know where we’re going, or if we think we know, we won’t know if we’re really heading in the right direction. We will take short-cuts that end up being long-cuts; we will go down dark alleys with thugs in the shadows; we will spend countless hours on paths that dwindle to nothing. We will find ourselves backtracking, retracing our steps, imagining new ideas for the journey.

Following Jesus is a journey. It is a process. One day you don’t just wake up and look at your life and say, “Finally, I’m a Jesus-follower!” The journey isn’t the destination. The journey is what happens on your way to your destination. The journey begins the moment you say, “I’m going to follow Jesus.” At that moment we scan the horizon, wondering what lies beyond the mountains, we step forward, and as Sam says in the Lord of the Rings, so we mutter to ourselves: “I wonder what sort of tale we’ve fallen into?”

We’ll never have following Jesus completely figured out. And I imagine tomorrow I will be adding, deleting, and re:modifying. That’s the journey, too.