I’ll Lose Weight Tomorrow

I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home. Luke 9:61

I put on quite a bit of weight during residency and suddenly found that most of my old clothes didn’t fit anymore. Not giving up on the hope of losing that weight though, I put the skinny clothes into a storage bin . . . where it sat for 15 years. Every time I saw that bin, I thought, I really need to lose weight and get back into those clothes. Many times, my wife just wanted to get rid of that stuff, but I remained optimistic. I’ll lose weight tomorrow. You’ll see. By the time I got around to fitting back into it – 15 years later – everything in that bin was hopelessly out of style.

I have a lot of good intentions. I have a lot of things that I plan to do . . . eventually. Those things are not important enough that I’ll change my life today, but perhaps tomorrow I’ll get there.

This seems to be the attitude of those described by Luke in today’s passage. In the story, Jesus called two men to follow him. One said he had to first go and bury his father, and the other said he had to first go and see to his family. Both intended to follow Christ, but both had other really important stuff to do first. Compare this to the disciples, who, when Christ called, immediately dropped everything to follow.

Jesus wasn’t saying that Christians cannot attend their parent’s funerals or see to their family’s needs. Rather, he lamented the attitude that says, I want to follow you Jesus, but I’ve got a lot of other important stuff to do first. I’ll follow you tomorrow when I’m not so busy.

Most of us have been here. We plan to lose weight. We plan to get sober. We plan to follow God. We have really good intentions, but we never quite get there, because we plan to do all those things tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes though, so we find ourselves stuck, day after day, in the old life.

If we want the new life, we must live in it today. Today is the day for radical change, not tomorrow. If we want the new life, which Christ died to provide for us, then today, we must do whatever it takes to abandon the old and follow the new.