These last months, I’ve been up to my elbows in home repair projects.  My construction skills are paltry, so I frequently tap a friend or pull up YouTube videos for help.  There are moments when the work requires intentionality and is the best kind of tedious such that I can enter a prayerful internal space while my fingertips dab caulk into cracks and nail holes.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.  It’s contemplative home repair.

One thing I’m learning in all of this repair work is that things rarely go as planned.  The window is not only cracked, but the sill has rotted through and the 2x4s underneath are damaged.  The new faucet is too tall for the medicine cabinet door to open.  The electrician’s assistant put his foot through the garage ceiling.  Things don’t turn out the way we expect or imagine or require.

That’s how it was for Jesus’ original disciples.  When Jesus asked them in Mark 8:27: “Who do people say that I am?” they responded that some people think that Jesus is John the Baptist or Elijah, that he’s cut from the same cloth as one of the prophets of old.  Peter, however, seems to get it.  He declares simply: “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29).

Yet in what way is Jesus the Christ?  Jesus’ own definition of his vocation and identity don’t add up to what Peter expects or imagines or requires.  Jesus said that he “must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (8:31).  In Peter’s mind, it just cannot be.  Surely God would not allow such rough treatment of someone so nice and likable as Jesus, the Messiah no less (v.32).  But Jesus knows his business and his path.  “Get behind me Satan!  For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (v.33).

We don’t know how Peter responded to that sharp rebuke.  His next recorded words depict him back in the same place, again trying to box Jesus in (“let us make three dwellings” Mark 9:5), again trying to massage the future so that it conforms to what he expects and imagines and plans.  Jesus shatters all of that with the way of the cross: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (v.34).

Here we all are, so often stuck in Peter’s rut: shoehorning our vision of ourselves and our futures into boxes that are too confining for Jesus’ wiley way.  We have reams of if/then statements, but they’re all too safe and conventional.  In some kind of unacknowledged doctrine of biblical karma, we imagine that we do the right things, then we will get the right outcomes.  

But no.  Following Jesus is right foot here, left foot on that slippery rock over there, and so on and on, along the jagged path.  The mind rebels, as it did for Peter.  Surely God would not allow such rough treatment of someone so nice and likable as us.  (Right?)  We too easily lose our way when things don’t work out as we planned.  We may even refuse to follow further, because busted outcomes rattle our sense of God’s justice in the world, our ordered self-stories, the stability of our identity.

To follow Jesus is to step into uncertainty.  If the cross, then anything—or near enough.  We don’t get to predetermine the outcome.  The Jesus way is a fearsome way.  

But the Jesus way is also good.  The cross scrambles our expectations, but Jesus’ death on the cross is also the source of our mercy and healing.  When we reject his pathways through our lives because they don’t conform to our plans, we also miss out on unexpected mercy and healing, the work of God prying us free from all that does not lead to real life.  There may be an element of the tragic in walking the Jesus way, but there’s also the possibility of living truly, faithfully, interestingly, even adventurously.  

How else could it be?  God has a plan even when our lives don’t go as planned. Jesus is leading us into a vocation that we cannot fully grasp and transforming us into an identity that we cannot entirely imagine (see Ephesians 3:20; 1 John 3:2).

So onward. Let us walk into the unplanned way of Jesus.