Yes, Lord. I’ll follow you.

Boom. Now you’re a Christ follower. You’ve believed in your heart and confessed with your mouth. Salvation? Check. Complete surrender? Check.

How bad can it be?

What if on the other side of yes meant:

• Losing the support of your family because they believe something different
• Biting your tongue when your only desire is to be heard
• Enduring several heartbreaks amidst your endless effort to love well
• Living paycheck to paycheck because God has called you to a lower paying job
• Being barren for the first few years of your marriage
• Being single for the complete decade of your twenties…scratch that, forever
• Committing to the lifelong struggle of fighting porn, alcohol and drug addictions
• Watching your child repeatedly deny Jesus and eventually spiral out
• Being uncomfortable
• Allowing a foster child to move in when you can barely support your own children
• Suffering from an illness where there is no cure

Would you still follow? Could you bear to justify that even in our darkest, imagined moments that Jesus still endured the worst? Will our allegiance be in our desires being filled or in the all-knowing, good God? In your deepest valley, can you even call Him good?

Obedience is not easy. We live in a romanticized world that has conditioned us to believe that every story should have a perfect ending. Yet we see day after day in our own lives that we are striving for something that may not exist. At some point, all things we hold close we must be willing to let go of.

You see, surrender is complete obedience. Our church culture preaches about confession and accountability and even purpose but what about simply doing what God has called us to do? I long to see a generation that submits fully to the authority of the Lord. Where our feelings are not the standard nor our lofty theological opinions, but the Word of God alone.

My allegiance has been tested, and I still say yes. It has cost me unbearable and unspoken pain, but none more than my Savior up on that cursed tree.

Yes, Lord, yes.