“It is said that before entering the sea, a river trembles with fear…” Kahlil Gibran’s words echo the heart of Jesus’ teaching. The river looks back at its journey, mountains, valleys, villages, and then faces the vast ocean. It fears it will disappear, but only in surrender does it discover it has become the ocean itself.
Jesus, too, calls us to that same surrender. Discipleship is not about clinging but about trusting, trusting that what feels like loss is in fact transformation. Our parents and loved ones are not “outside” of us to be renounced; they live within us, shaping who we are. What Jesus asks is that we hold them, and everything else, within the larger embrace of God.
Rumi reminds us: “The leaf of every tree brings a message from the unseen world. Look, every falling leaf is a blessing!” Letting go does not wound us when we see it through God’s eyes, it blesses us. Every surrender is not an erasure but an expansion; every cost becomes a doorway into deeper life.
Jesus’ images of the builder and the king remind us that discipleship is deliberate, not casual. To follow Him is to weigh our choices, to step forward with awareness and readiness. Yet the paradox remains: what looks like cost becomes gift, what feels like emptiness becomes fullness.
To be a disciple, then, is not the privilege of a chosen few, it is the invitation to all. To let go like the river, to fall like the leaf, to trust that in God nothing is truly lost. What we release returns to us transformed, and in the letting go, we too are made new.
- Lilly Pushpam PBVM
No comments:
Post a Comment