Walking Our Long Road

We Have Been Walking A Long Road.

Not Just Today. These Past Weeks. Fifty Days Of Easter And Most Of Us Treat It Like It Ended The Sunday It Started. We Do The Sunrise. We Do The Ham. We Move On. The Church Does Not Move On. The Church Says Stay. Keep Walking. There Is More Being Revealed.

Look at what has been laid in front of us

Three Weeks Ago — Emmaus. Two disciples with their feet pointed away from jerusalem. Not rebels. Not atheists. Exhausted believers who had given everything and watched it fall apart. *we had hoped,* they said. Past tense. That sentence is the most honest thing in the whole gospel and we barely stop on it. The risen christ walks alongside them, opens the scriptures, stays for supper, breaks the bread — and in that breaking their eyes open. Then he vanishes. He always does. Not because he has left. Because he has moved further in than our eyes can follow.

Two weeks ago — The Good Shepherd. His sheep know His voice. That is the claim. And it is one we need to sit with uncomfortably, because the honest question is whether we actually do anymore. We have filled our lives with noise and called it living. We have called our preferences discernment. We have gotten very comfortable in pews without letting the Word do anything dangerous to us. The sheep who have wandered are not mostly hostile. They are deaf. Slowly, quietly, gradually deaf. And we let it happen.

Last Week — the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Philip asked for the Father. Just show us the Father and that will be enough. That is every one of us. We want certainty. We want something solid when everything else is shaking. And the answer He gives is not a what. It is a who. The destination is a Person. The path is a Person. The truth is not a system — it is a Man with wounds in His hands who is still standing. We keep asking God to show up. He keeps pointing to what He already sent.

Which is exactly what today makes plain.

A permanent deacon in my diocese opened his homily this weekend with a single question: *Do you love Me?* And I have not been able to shake it from my thoughts.

Because that is where it starts. Not a command yet. A question. The same question He asked Peter three times on the shore after the resurrection — once for every denial. He does not ask it to shame us. He asks it because the answer determines everything that follows. *If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.* This is not a guilt trip. It is a description. Love without obedience is sentiment. It feels good and produces nothing. Real love has a shape. It looks like something on a Tuesday morning when nobody is watching. It tells the truth when a lie would cost less. It stays when staying is hard. It serves without needing the recognition. This particular Deacon has indeed felt, struggles, but ultimately answered that question, and following the command. I know what that looks like because I have watched it.

Another friend — someone I consider close — is a missionary thousands of miles from home. He came. He did the hard work. He learned the culture, the people, the rhythms. He became comfortable in the heart of Appalachia America— and comfort is not a small thing when you are that far from everything familiar. Now comes the reassignment. A new place. Start over. And without hesitation, without negotiating with God over the terms, he will go without question. That is obedience. Not the gritted-teeth kind. The kind that has already settled the question of who is Lord so completely that the answer to every new command is simply, yes. In more ancient times, a Herald, would go where his king commanded and proclaim the message, without resistance. My friend has embraced that, and is a living representation of that.

We want to separate the warmth of the relationship from the weight of the command. He will not let us do that. They are the same thing. So before we answer the command we have to answer the question. Not the version of ourselves we bring to Mass — the version that drives home alone, that lies awake at three in the morning, that knows exactly where the gap is between what we profess and how we actually live.

Do you love Me? Answer that first. Everything else follows from there.

I intended to stop there, but speaking about obedience I’m going to stop writing and start preaching for a moment, at myself more than anything, so pardon the pulpit.but I need to say something plainly about faith, because we have romanticized it into something it is not.

Faith does not come without trials

In fact it is the opposite. Faith is not the absence of doubt. It is not the absence of hesitation or discomfort or the feeling that you are in over your head. Those things are not the enemies of faith — they are the conditions in which faith is actually formed. You cannot have faith where everything is certain. You cannot have faith where everything is safe. Faith by definition requires that something in you does not yet see what it is being asked to walk toward. The doubt is not the problem. The hesitation is not the problem. The discomfort is not the problem. The promise is still the promise despite all of it.

And we have to stop weighing each blessing on a scale for comparison. That is one of the quietest ways we talk ourselves out of obedience. We look at what God gave someone else and decide our assignment is not worth the cost. We measure our cross against another man's cross and wonder why ours feels heavier. We count what we have been given and decide it is not enough to justify what is being asked of us. That is not discernment. That is ingratitude dressed up as reason. Every blessing has a purpose specific to the person carrying it. Every trial has a weight specific to the faith being built in you. None of it is accidental. He does not miscalculate. We are called to commission, not negotiation.

We've replaced lament with ultimatum.

Lament is honest. Lament says — I don’theunderstand this, it hurts, I am tired, but I trust You. The Psalms are full of it. ‘How long, O Lord.’ That is not weakness. That is faith talking to God in the dark. But we have traded that for something harder and colder. We stopped crying out and started laying out terms. We tell God what we are willing to endure before we walk away. We set conditions on our obedience. We pray with an exit already planned. That is not prayer. That is negotiation dressed in religious language. And it produces nothing — not peace, not movement, not growth — because it was never really surrender. It was leverage. God does not respond to leverage. He responds to the broken and the honest. He responds to the soul that has nothing left to offer but its own exhaustion and still shows up anyway. That is lament. That is the prayer that moves something. Not because it is eloquent. Because it is real. And choosing to move anyway — choosing to obey despite what you feel, despite what you cannot see, despite every reason your flesh gives you to stay where you are — that is what faith actually is. Faith in its truest form is obedience. Not blind compliance. Not the absence of questions. But a settled decision that the One who is calling you is more trustworthy than your own fear. That is the ground we stand on when we walk out those doors. Not certainty. Not comfort. The promise.

Where obedience to the Helper comes in.

Jesus did not leave us alone. He sent the Holy Spirit — not so we could stay comfortable, but so we would have what we need to move. The Spirit is not a feeling we receive at Mass and file away until next Sunday. He is a Person. And He is calling us beyond our routines, beyond our preferences, beyond these walls. Obedience to Him means moving when every part of us wants to stay still. It means trusting that the One who sent us is already in the place He is sending us to.

When we step outside what is familiar we are not improvising. We are not alone. We carry what we were given. That is the reassurance we rest on in whatever discomfort we will encounter out there when we truly walk by faith.

"I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you- John 14:18"