By Brandi Hignight

 

What do you call a follower who doesn’t follow?

The answer is Brandi Hignight.

Rachel asked me what passage of scripture had been an anchor for me in 2016.

I said John 21 where Jesus said to Peter, “Follow Me.” I was more haunted than anchored by it really. Somehow I want more information. I want a roadmap, instructions, the who, what, where, when, and how.

Oh, and I want to call the shots.

Is it just me?! Am I alone in this?

And if I did know all those things–then what?

We will come back to that, but it’s sounding an awful lot like I want Jesus following me than me following Him.

As for me, fourteen years diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, two years not being able to safely drive a car, seven months using a wheelchair at work for mobility because the cane was not enough.

But so what? If the goal is holiness–if the main thing is Christlikeness and being transformed into His image. Then that diagnosis, that inconvenience, that pain, that whatever–is not wasted.

Even a wheelchair.

If I don’t cling to Him now, then I have serious doubts that a healthy, car driving, walker Brandi would.

He knows we need Him (nothing more). That is why I believe He says, “Follow Me.” (Period). Not follow Me to a destination or with more money in your pocket.  It is a call to us all: young, old, weak, strong, healthy, sick, rich, poor, and otherwise.

 

“The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack. He lets me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He renews my life; He leads me along the right paths for His name’s sake. Even when I go through the darkest valley, I fear no danger, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff — they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Only goodness and faithful love will pursue me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord as long as I live.”  Psalm 23:1-6

“My sheep hear My voice, I know them, and they follow Me.”  John 10:27

 

When the architect Frank Lloyd Wright was a boy of nine, he walked with his uncle across a snowy field one cold, gray morning. His uncle was a driven man, bristling with impatience. The clock inside him boomed like a war drum, drove like ramrod. One across the field, the uncle stopped and turned around and called young Frank to come stand beside him The uncle’s tracks in the snow were like stitch made on cloth: clean, straight, tight, evenly spaced. But young Frank’s tracks were a skein: a looping, disheveled mess of wanderings and shufflings and backtrackings.

“Frank,” the uncle said, “notice how your tracks wander aimlessly from the fence to the cattle to the woods and back again. And see how my tracks aim directly to their goal. There is an important lesson in that.”

“I determined right then,” Frank Lloyd Wright said years later, “not to miss most things in life, as my uncle had.”

No one doubts that Frank Lloyd Wright had a sense of call and purpose that never stirred in his old uncle’s blood.

Jesus lived like that. Jesus was a man of ultimate destiny, pursuing a cosmic goal, eternal in scope, high as the heavens, deep as the pit, gathering all nations and all generations, enduring the passing away of all things. But He never made clean tracks in the snow–or sand. He went here, He went there, moved by seeming whim, chance, need, second thought and afterthought, and some inward tug of holy instinct. His zigzagging journey was anything but the anxious rushing about that characterizes our own living. It was, rather, the manner of one whose life is completely His own possession and free to give to whomever He pleases, however He pleases, whenever He pleases.

~Mark Buchanan

Your God is Too Safe