Give up everything?

After shedding more tears than I care to admit, I finally finished reading Same Kind of Different as Me last week. I cried so hard I was thisclose to throwing up. The only reason I didn't was that I was too tired to get out of bed to puke. TMI. Guess I should've warned you.

So between that book, our BSF study in Isaiah, and reading Crazy Love for our ministry workshop on Saturday, my brain and my heart are working on overdrive. I'm on a collision course with truth and am finally taking a good look at who God is, how He views sin, and what it means to really follow Him.

I honestly don't know what it means. I mean, sure, Jesus commands us to give up everything to follow Him. I don't always do that. I hold on to my plans and my family and my stuff. Why am I trying to give God my leftovers?

I can't continue to compare myself to others, thinking that "how I'm doing" is somehow relative to those around me. It's not.

As A.W. Tozer put it, "...the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like."

If I will actually come to a point that I grasp the magnitude of God (note that I didn't say "understand Him fully;" that is impossible), my life will be different. I won't look like a church-ified version of the world.

My thoughts are pretty jumbled right now as I process, but here's what it comes down to in the words of Francis Chan: " Following Christ isn't something that can be done halfheartedly or on the side. It is not a label we can display when it is useful. It must be central to everything we do and are."