What Has It Cost You?
When I registered my first business and I got my business cards, I was so excited seeing my name on a card that I helped design and thus understood the meaning of everything on it. I loved it. Somehow, I thought the whole world would love it as much as I did. It did not.
The first conference I went to, I gave everyone my card. And I mean EVERYONE! As long as we had had a 30 second conversation, I would thrust my card into a hand or a bag and feel very accomplished. On the last day of the conference, I hang around after most of the participants had left and the ground was littered by my name and my logo. My heart was crushed. It hurt to see something I loved and valued being swept up at every corner and in the trash.
More recently, I was part of a project where the client had boxes of free product that was meant to be distributed among people who had never experienced the product. The team was split between handing out the product at malls and other public areas and partnering vendors so that their customers get to go with ‘our product’ after buying stuff over a certain value. I was against handing out the product to every Tom and Melissa out there because I was afraid we would find the product dumped or wasted because the people wouldn’t value it. My lesson from the incident with my business card was that if people have not invested time, money or effort towards something, then they will not value it and thus treat it any-howly and miss out on the amazing experience and value.
Coming from that place of understanding the dynamics of value, I have found myself wondering, what has it cost me to love Jesus and know Jesus as my saviour and my friend? And do I value this relationship?
See I have lived the Christian life from as far back as I can remember. I started having questions about this Christian life as a teenager and into my early twenties that no one could answer and many times, those that I asked aggressively would resort to ‘putting me in my place’, whatever that means. So I left the whole church scene because I could not settle for generic answers that did not feel authentic. Looking for something authentic, I started reading about different religions and engaging with Buddhists, Muslims, new agers and all sorts of people and their belief systems. The interesting thing about this quest for understanding is that I found people and characters that looked like and felt like the Jesus of the Bible. So after a year of searching I came to the conclusion that there is something to this Jesus. But I still couldn’t stand Christians. Many years later, I came to understand that realization as a turning point because now Jesus looked for me. And he found me at my workplace, in a tiny recording booth before the sun had come up. He found me in pieces and tired of trying to keep the pieces together. He asked me what it would take to keep me from walking out on my own life. I told him what it would take… and he made it happen. I still was not convinced about the whole church thing, and I started thinking my imagination had run ahead of me regarding Jesus finding me. So He found me again and I started wondering if I was going mad but it was getting harder and harder to deny the reality of those encounters. So I finally accepted that Jesus is real and that He died for me to live and that He is my friend. I also accepted that everyone who knew me would finally be convinced that madness had now sat on me properly.
So what has it cost me to know Jesus? It has cost me friends and community, it has cost me credibility in my social environments and it continues to cost me.
On one hand, after having lost what I have lost because Jesus, I find, that relationship means so much to me and I will do the work to keep it. On the other hand, it’s impossible not to feel the loss and it does hurt. But I am also learning and seeing that God doesn’t leave His people in a lurch. Whatever it has cost me to follow Jesus, God himself brings better, stronger and more. Where I lost friends, God has brought me new friends. Where I lost what I thought was my career, God is rebuilding it from the foundation in a way that makes more sense now. I am learning that saying yes to Jesus is allowing God to start the process of dismantling everything that is not from Him and rebuilding everything about me for His glory. It is a process that all goes back to how much I value the relationship with Jesus.
But what has it cost you? How much do you value it?
