I love you. (I must be going)

Hello and welcome to Scattered Moments Brief Reflections on Faith and the Quiet Places White Appears. This moment I'm entitling I Love You, I Must Be Going. There is a quiet way to measure faith, not by what we say, not even by what we believe, but by whether we can move on. Jesus had a way of bringing people to that moment. A line in the sand, a decision that couldn't be postponed. In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 9, three voices rise from the crowd. Three people who wanted to follow, but not quite yet. The first man spoke boldly. It sounds heroic, but Jesus answers: foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. In other words, there is no map, no five-year plan, no guaranteed landing places. And if I'm honest, that's what unsettles me most because I want predictability. I want an address. I want to know how this will all shake out. But sometimes life hands you none of that. Sometimes you leave the fire smelling like smoke, climbing into the nearest car with no explanation and no certainty. Don't mistake that feeling for abandonment. He's there. He's just silent. Another voice speaks. It was a delay. His dad was still alive. It was a way of saying, Let me handle life first. And Jesus responds, Let the dead bury their own dead. But you go proclaim the King, the King God of God. Now that feels sharp until you realize what he's saying. Don't live your life in the shadow of what hasn't happened yet. Some of us are already grieving tomorrow, already carrying losses that haven't come. But the call of Christ is always present, tense, alive, moving. We don't camp out and imagine sorrow. We trust. We step forward. And then the third voice says, I will follow you, Lord, but first let me go back and say goodbye. And Jesus replies, No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God. No one. That one hits home because leaving is rarely clean, is it? We linger, we replay, we wonder if we should have stayed longer, said more, done more. We look back until the past becomes heavier than the call ahead. But at some point you have to stop turning around. You have to cry the tears, hug the necks, and pack the boxes, and go. As Basil the Great once said, When a man says I have to give myself to God, he must not look back. Now this is a humbling thought. There has never been a place that I left that fell apart because I was gone. People go on, ministries go on, churches go on, God remains faithful. We are loved, but we are not indispensable. And that's not discouraging, that's freeing. Because it means the weight of the world was never ours to carry. So when that moment comes, and it will come, when the questions rise, when the bargaining begins, when people don't quite understand, you can simply say, I love you. I must be going. And trust that the same God who called you forward will take care of everything when you leave. And that's today's scattered moments. Until next time, take care. Notice the scattered moments and share the grace.