The Beautiful Upset
Mark 16:6-8
“He has risen! He is not here… He is going ahead of you.”
I’ve been sitting with a question most of the day. It’s one of those questions that doesn’t let you go — the kind that follows you into traffic, into lunch, into the quiet moments between tasks. The question came from a podcast I’ve been listening to, the final question of a six-week series called The Beautiful Upset:
How is Jesus going before you, even now?
I don’t have a clean answer. I’m not sure I’m supposed to yet.
It started about two and a half years ago. My church, Crosswalk Chattanooga, did something I had never seen a church do before. They preached a sermon series on mental health. They called it Unbroken. No dramatic altar calls, no tidy resolutions — just an honest look at something most of us carry but rarely name out loud.
Something shifted in me during those weeks. I can’t fully explain it, but it felt like a door cracking open. And in the space of that opening, I started talking to God differently. Not the polished, sanitized version of prayer I had grown comfortable with — something rawer. Something more like What do you want from me? What are we supposed to be doing here?
Looking back, I think that was the catapult moment.
The invitation that followed felt wide open. No fine print. No itinerary. Just an open-ended come and see — the same kind Jesus had offered two thousand years earlier to a handful of fishermen who had no idea what they were agreeing to.
I have to be honest: if I had known what this season would cost me, I’m not sure I would have opened that door.
But I didn’t know. And I think God knew exactly what He was doing.
Those early mornings driving into work became something I didn’t expect — sacred. Just me and God in the car, windows up, no agenda. A strange, quiet intimacy that I had never quite made room for before. I was leaning in. And somewhere in that leaning, something began.
The disciples didn’t ask for a cost breakdown before they left their nets. They just went. And somewhere down the road, the bill came due — in ways they couldn’t have anticipated when they said yes on the lakeshore.
I understand that now in a way I didn’t before.
For me the cost was concrete. A lost job. A salary that didn’t just drop — it fell by 80%. The kind of number that rewrites your sense of stability overnight.
And then there was something harder to name than any of that. A quieter erosion. The longer the silence stretched — the unanswered applications, the waiting, the uncertainty — the more I found myself wrestling with a question that had nothing to do with money:
Am I worth anything?
That question is different from financial strain. It goes somewhere deeper. It doesn’t show up on a budget spreadsheet. It shows up in the mirror, in the middle of the night, in the space between who you thought you were and who you’re not sure you are anymore. That particular cost may have been the most expensive thing I paid in this season.
There were social costs too. Costs I’m still probably cataloging.
To follow Jesus, there will be a cost. That is not a warning buried in fine print. It is written plainly into every story He ever invited someone into.
And yet.
For everything I lost in this season, I am slowly becoming aware that something has been added that I don’t have adequate language for yet. A richness I can sense more than I can explain. I suspect I’ll spend years uncovering what God quietly placed in my hands during the very stretch of time I was most convinced I was losing everything.
The story isn’t finished. I don’t have the ending.
But I’m beginning to believe that’s exactly the point. Jesus doesn’t hand you a completed map. He goes ahead. He tells you He’ll meet you in Galilee. And He asks you to trust that He is already there — even now, especially now — in whatever unknown territory is coming next.
I’m still working on my answer to the question.
But I think the wrestling is the answer.
To be continued……
For Reflection
What has following Jesus cost you — and are you willing to consider that the very thing you lost may have been the beginning of something you haven’t fully seen yet?
Jesus is described as going ahead of you — not behind you, not beside you, but ahead. Where in your life right now does it feel like He may already be waiting for you to catch up?
