Following Jesus to the Margins

When Jesus said, "If anyone would come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me," He was not offering a self-help program. He was issuing an invitation to walk toward the people and places that comfortable religion avoids.

Rachel Held Evans once wrote about how following Jesus kept dragging her to tables she never expected to sit at — tables with doubters, outcasts, and people the church had wounded. That is the cross. Not a gold pendant hanging safely around our necks, but the daily, deliberate choice to abandon the security of certainty and step into solidarity with those who suffer.

A congregation in Portland discovered this when they stopped asking "How do we grow our church?" and started asking "What is breaking in our neighborhood?" They found a community of unhoused teenagers sleeping under an overpass three blocks from their sanctuary. Discipleship became sleeping bags and hot meals on Tuesday nights. It became showing up at city council meetings. It became learning names — Jaylen, Maria, Derek — and refusing to look away.

Taking up your cross means letting go of the privilege of not having to care. It means following the Rabbi from Nazareth into the uncomfortable, inconvenient, kingdom-shaped life where your own comfort is no longer the point.