Wednesday, November 8, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Follow me
I can’t get the great horned owl’s bright yellow eyes out of my mind. Saturday at the Austin Celtic Festival we clapped with step dancers and snapped to attention with bagpipers. We watched men and women throw big things around in the Highland games, but especially we were mesmerized by the owl.
He looks heavy, but weighed only five pounds, covered by beautiful feathers and down. I’ve held chickens often, so I wasn’t too surprised. He was just eight months old, which is old enough for him to look full grown. His handlers watched him fly back and forth between his two perches, and I wanted to be one of those handlers, loving the bird. I wanted to know that owl, and hold him, and feed him, and take him home with me.
Miles and Jasper wanted to keep that big owl in their bedroom, too. Which little kid at the festival didn’t want to take him home? Those wonderful yellow eyes incited us. We would follow him anywhere.
Great crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned and addressed them, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
I suppose there were many many men and women who wanted to take Jesus home with them. He would feed them, heal them, care for their every need. But Jesus had a completely different idea, that they would choose to follow him. But that would not be a choice many would make.
Everyone who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.
Give up everything, and follow me. As I listened to the bird trainer speak lovingly about his birds of prey, many of whom were “rescue” birds, I thought he had done this, this giving up everything to follow his calling, follow his love for the birds bringing them with him to show after show, alone after the applause with his friend Steve … and the birds.
Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion?
That would be what Jesus did, and was doing, and insisted his followers do as well
In line at the admission gate I met the parents and grandparents of Danika, a woman competing in the Highland Games, who would be “tossing” the caber, a 47 pound, 10 foot tapered telephone pole. Pick it up, balance it on your shoulder, lift it a little higher and push it up, out and forward,  so it will turn over away from you. Only two of the women accomplished this, and Danika was one of them. She came over to the fence where her family was standing. Her parents came from California. Her grandparents had traveled from Hawaii.
“Ah, so GOOD to do this in front of my family!” Her eyes flashed, she smiled. She felt loved. She was loved.
Brothers and sisters, owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another. Love is the fulfillment of the law.
(Romans 13, Psalm 112, 1 Peter 4, Luke 14)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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