Counting the cost

Jesus does an odd thing for a man trying to gather a crowd. He tells them to do the math first. Which of you, wanting to build a tower, does not sit down and count the cost to see whether you can finish? He will not let anyone follow Him on a wave of feeling that has not reckoned with the price. Discipleship is a tower, and towers have a bill, and He would rather you count it now than abandon a half-built ruin later for everyone to mock. Upheaval has a bill too, and it always comes due. Centuries after that hillside, by the rivers of Babylon, the exiles learned exactly what their tower had cost. They sat down — the same posture Jesus named — and they wept, remembering the Zion they had lost. There is no pretending in that scene. No one tells them to cheer up because exile will work out for the good. They sit by the water and grieve what is gone, and the grief is not faithlessness. It is the honest invoice of an upheaval, read aloud and paid in tears. Scripture lets them weep without rebuke. It does not rush the mourning, and it does not pretend the loss was small.

We are bad at this. We want the upheaval without the bill — the new life without grieving the old one, the deconstruction without the loss of the people who deconstructed differently, the move of God without counting what the move costs. And so we either refuse to begin, or we begin pretending it is free, and the unpaid grief ambushes us later with interest. Counting the cost is not the opposite of faith; it is faith with its eyes open. You are allowed to sit down by the river. You are allowed to weep for what the shaking is taking — the relationships that will not survive it, the certainties you cannot get back, the version of yourself you are losing and quietly loved. None of that mourning is unbelief. The exiles wept and were still God's people; their tears were on the way to a return they could not yet see. Grieve the cost honestly. The upheaval that gets mourned is the one you can actually walk through; the one you pretend is painless is the one that breaks you in the dark.