Today Jesus promises rewards for those who give up their loved ones and possessions for His sake and the Gospel. He says, “No one has given up home, brothers or sisters, mother or father, children or property, for me and for the Gospel who will not receive in this present age a hundred times more." But, of course, giving up something or someone is not only for priests and religious who renounce family and personal property to imitate Christ more closely. We can all learn to sacrifice something to witness Christ's presence in the world.
What does God ask us to give up? For the apostles, it meant their hovels, rickety boats, some old fishermen’s nets, and their whole world. Doing this presupposes much incredible generosity, untiring effort, and sacrifices.
For us, what God wants us to give up is maybe to leave behind our family and friends if we move to a new place. Maybe God wants us to give up some friends because they infect us with worldly things. Our time and money can be sacrificed if we want to address the needs around us. We may have to give up something we treasure for those who need it more than us. Giving up is hard because we fear that God won’t replace what we lose, yet He wants to give us even more.
In relation to this giving up, I read this personal story of a church leader and, at the same time, a mother. She learned this by giving up way back in the 1980s when she was the leader of a prayer group and the editor of the monthly Charismatic newsletter for her diocese. God wanted her to give up both ministries to better care for her pregnancy and young children; this didn’t make sense to her because no one in the prayer group was willing to lead, and no one associated with the newsletter knew how to organize and edit it. After weeks of refusing to believe that God did want her to quit, she noticed that the problems created by her not quitting were getting bigger and bigger. In the end, she decided to trust God’s advice. She quit.
As a result, the free time He gave her evolved into writing articles for Christian magazines. Just as she’d expected, the prayer group fell apart, but something new and better grew up in its place. And God sent a new editor to the newsletter who did a better job than she did.
In this regard, we must trust Jesus as we accept the changes He makes in our Christian lives. This trust in Him always rewards us with new friends, new apostolates, and new blessings that surpass what we had before we gave something up. He replaces it with something a hundred times better, for He is more generous than you and I.
I remember that wherever I was first assigned, particularly in difficult mission situations, someone - some family or a circle of friends - supported me in good times and bad. God’s providence and goodness have always been there for me, without which I could have hardly survived. Only by God’s grace I managed to do His work.
When you serve God, you get rewarded. It comes in ways you don’t expect, forms you don’t notice, and sometimes in ways you least imagine. When you serve God, you always win. Guaranteed!
Father Boby John, C.S.C., ordained a priest in the Congregation of Holy Cross in 2008, worked as a pastor and as an educator with tribal populations in Northeast India for thirteen years. Originally from Kerala, India, Father Boby grew up with three siblings. He is a dedicated and detailed educationist with experience in educational leadership. He is currently working as an executive assistant at the world headquarters of Holy Cross Family Ministries, North Easton, Massachusetts.
