Stations Journal Journey #27

Oct 15, 2025

What is the cost of discipleship?

This question has come to the forefront of this project and has simmered throughout my life. And yes, I’m speaking financially, though there are, of course, many other layers to it.

I have been wrestling with Jesus as I literally create his hands and bind them to the cross in stitches, patterns, textures, shapes, and fabric. I have also wrestled with this question of cost for more than 30 years, faithfully doing the work I knew I was called to do, yet doing so in the unique and unconventional role of an artist who serves the church from outside the church. It is both a ministry and a business.

That is one of my God-given gifts: to imagine a way where no prepared way exists, with integrity, passion, and care. I am learning to better understand the monetary value (as defined by the world) of the work I am infused with so that I can continue to do it. Yet any day of the week, I can talk myself out of it, grateful to have a roof over my head and food on the table (thank you, dear partner). This tension between work and remuneration has been with me for many years.

And now, I realize, it is the very thing that can crucify me again and again.

My work is what I must give to the world. I know that sounds lofty, but it remains true. I am designing and co-creating living relics that are part of a reimagining of the church of the future. Because I’m also an active church leader in rural Canada, where congregations are small, I live with the constant awareness that budgets are tight. For my whole career, I’ve tried to balance the cost of discipleship between what I feel I can accept for my work and what that might cost a church or clergy student.

Add to that the questions that come from potential customers, current customers, or family. Add my desire to fairly hire underemployed people and to grow the business so I no longer have to do everything alone. Add a project born from my heart and soul, one that has come through my own time and spiritual maturation, but that remains, so far, without remuneration. Add unsuccessful grant applications, the need to fundraise, decades of lay leadership, and motherhood too.

It all adds up to giving myself away, again and again, in the name of Christ. That is the current cost of discipleship. Mostly, I do it willingly, because that is who I was designed to be.

Now, as I find myself three-quarters of the way through this profound project that has shaped and will continue to shape my life, I recognize that this season feels just as intense and all-consuming as when cancer once lived in my body.

Yet it is time for my understanding of cost to evolve. It is time to understand value more deeply: my value, and my worth.

I am meant to be here, completing this series. As I sew the dark black nails that pierce the hands, and stitch the loincloth, the eyes, the bloodstreaks of my Jesus, it becomes a full-body experience. I am living my work. And that makes it rich and filling beyond words.

This is what I trust for today.