W
hen the roses died silent and the fringes of the petals withered scarlet like dried blood, I thought of You and my ears rang hard with the hammer.
I was sitting at the table when a few of the petals fell.
I watched them; I witnessed.
They made not a sound.
Like a lamb led.
And it’s a long time I sit still before I finally move, before I finally reach for the petals, before I finger their bleeding edges.
I remember how I had swooned when The Farmer had brought this bouquet in the door. How I’d admired these roses for days, a week, in the early morning sun.
But You never called for admirers; You the Christ called for disciples, for followers, not the numbering kind, not the tribe kind, not the fan club kind, but the ready to walk The Way kind, the ready to be rejected, willing to suffer, prepared to die kind.
In a world of Twitter and Google and Facebook, do I forget that to be a follower means that You have a claim on me? That I must put feet to the dust and I must put my foot in Your print and I must feel the bulk of the Cross on my back, feel its bark on my skin, and I must taste suffering, and poverty, and disdain — now, today, and right here.
Real followers don’t point and click; real followers pay a cost.
And Christ’s life indeed makes it manifest, terrifyingly manifest, what dreadful untruth it is to admire the truth instead of following it. When there is no danger, when there is a dead calm, when everything is favorable to our Christianity, then it is all too easy to confuse an admirer with a follower.
And this can happen very quietly. The admirer can be under the delusion that the position he takes is the true one, when all he is doing is playing it safe. Give heed, therefore, to the call of discipleship!
If you have any knowledge of human nature, who can doubt that Judas was an admirer of Christ?
~Kierkegaard
An admirer sacrifices nothing but sporadic applause, while the true Follower daily forgoes his own life.
Like Kierkegaard suggested, the Follower aspires to become Who he admires.
I clutch dead rose petals in hand.
They warm and bleed and smudge into me.
Then he said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.“ ~Luke 9:23
Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did. ~1 Jn. 2:6
Photos: walking to Calvary here
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