Unfollowing Jesus - Christianity Today (2024)

I’d run away from my own life more than once. But this time, at 27, I meant it. I filled a backpack with food, waited for low tide, and hiked down to a remote derelict cabin. I wanted to give up on everything, even on Jesus. I had chosen to follow him as a teenager, but life seemed to have gotten harder rather than easier. Maybe life would be better without him.

Who hasn’t “unfollowed” Jesus at some point? We’ve all distrusted him, even betrayed him, in ways large and small. We’ve all been like Peter at one time or another. Yet when his best friends abandoned him, Jesus wasn’t shocked or even angry. Instead, after his resurrection, he showed up with bread and fish.

What happened next in those moments around the fire reveals the astonishing power of the gospel. Peter was entirely forgiven of his faithlessness, his selfishness, his fear. And I am as well, and every one of us who has ever run away from the one who is our very life. This is the truth about following Christ: When Jesus said, “Come, follow after me,” it also meant that he would come after us. We tend to think it’s our responsibility to walk perfectly, to always know our way, but we don’t. We stumble, we faint, we take the wrong turn, and still he comes after us. He will walk on water to find us. He comes after us through storms, through fish, through doubt, through whatever seas we are sailing. Do you hear him? Come, follow me. Do not be afraid.

Leslie Leyland Fields is an Alaskan commercial fisherwoman and award-winning author of several books, including Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus Through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt, and the Seas. Learn more at www.leslieleylandfields.com. This devotional content is adapted from Crossing the Waters, copyright © 2016 by Leslie Leyland Fields. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.