Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self? Luke 9:23-25
“In reality, although following Jesus and leaving everything go hand in hand, it is necessary first of all to follow Christ in order to be able to leave everything. Indeed, only to the extent that I follow Him, that I walk in His footsteps so as to become His disciple little by little, do I discover how cluttered my life is, how much I need to be set free. At the beginning…we are ready to make radical sacrifices. We would like to leave everything, give everything. But, very quickly, we discover that God always asks of us something that we had not thought of, sometimes even apparently insignificant things of which we are incapable of letting go.
To follow Jesus, therefore, is to embark on a veritable discovery of oneself; a discovery of all those secret attachments, those unconfessed refusals, those secret wounds. We would have liked to leave everything, we were aspiring to freedom, and here we discover, with a sort of disillusionment that can sometimes lead to despair or turn into cynicism, that we are caught in our own trap. And if we are somewhat lucid and honest with ourselves, we can dare to acknowledge that following Jesus, leaving everything for Him, is beyond our capacity…But, paradoxically, this realization of our resistance, of inability to respond to His call, is perhaps, in reality, the most precious fruit…For when we have consented to our own poverty, then God can finally begin to work within us.”
Dom Jean-Charles Nault in “Follow Me” Aleteia blog post dated 21 September 2017. Special thanks to John Stanley for alerting me to this profound reading.
Think about it! Following Jesus is about learning all the things we need to let go of so that we can experience life in Him. It takes us on a journey of discovery about ourselves. We find “those secret attachments, those unconfessed refusals, those secret wounds” that hold us back. The acknowledgement that following Jesus is “beyond our capacity” is the most beautiful proclamation because only in our humble poverty do we begin to understand life in the kingdom (cf. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” Matthew 5:3).
I am praying for Jenni today as her teaching at the women’s retreat at Camp Spofford is aimed at helping about 150 women grasp life in God more deeply.
Jesus is not trying to keep us from gaining good things. He’s giving us the most generous advice possible. We must let go of clutter to take hold of Christ. We don’t realize all the areas of our lives that are filled with clutter. If He revealed them all to us at once, it would overwhelm us. Today’s post is not a call to generosity, but rather, a call to following that precedes generosity. Father in heaven, show us what clutters our lives and hinders the generous work of your Spirit in and through us. Give us courage to leave it today and follow You. Amen.