Note: On Tuesdays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
“No one can take them out of my hand,” Jesus says of his followers in today’s Gospel reading from John 10. He makes it all sound so easy: he leads, we follow. He gives eternal life; we accept it.
Except, of course, that it’s not that easy.
He leads us to places we may not want to go, places of beauty and prestige and honor for which we feel woefully unqualified and inadequate. He leads us to other places we may not want to go as well, places of pain and misery and persecution that we believe we cannot bear.
And yet, as Christians, we know what we must do.
Follow.
Follow wherever He leads, to the sweet places and the sour, to the joyful places and the sorrowful.
We like to talk about our faith journey, where we’ve been and where we are today. But where we’re going? No matter how much we think we control our destinies, we know in our souls that if we are true Christians, we control very little, other than conducting our lives in as Christlike a manner as we can… and turning away from the temptations that beckon us elsewhere.
He leads. We follow.
It’s as simple and as challenging as that.
