Yes, but...

In Luke 9, walking down the road with Jesus, one man said to Jesus, "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus replied, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."


Jesus said to another man, "Follow me." But the man replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father."... Still another man said, "I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family."

Jesus calls out to all of us: follow me. And the response of most? Yes, Lord, but...

The first man says, "Yes, Jesus, that sounds nice. I want to do that. But I'm going to just go home, spend a few nice years with my aging father until he passes and then after that I'll come find you."

The second man responds, "Yes, ok, I will follow you, but let me go home and say some goodbyes first."

Are these requests outrageous? I don't think so. They are the pleas of people who love their family and want to get some things straightened out before they radically change their life, following a man who claims to be the Son of Man.

But Jesus calls us to follow him. And to follow him not carefully, not after meticulous planning, not when the time seems right, not when it is easy, not when we have dotted our "i's" and crossed our "t's".

In fact he warns us, "the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." He says that a life lead by him will not be comfortable or easy or cushy.

But he calls, nonetheless, to follow. To surrender. To yield. To be lead. NOW.

There are so many "yes, but..."s I have about following with the entirety of my life. Do you have "yes, but..."s? What would it look like for us to just simply say, "Yes, Lord, I will go."