Take Nothing for the Journey

“Jesus summoned the Twelve and began to send them out two by two...He instructed them to take nothing for the journey but a walking stick –no food, no sack, no money in their belts.” Mark 6:7-8

When St. Francis of Assisi heard the gospel on taking nothing for the journey on Feb. 24, 1208, he was overjoyed. I can't imagine anyone being overjoyed at Jesus' instructions to the Twelve Apostles to go out preaching and to take nothing but a walking stick! But Saint Francis had been feeling the pull of God in dreams and visions, and he felt that this was the clear direction he had been seeking.

Although he had been a rich young man, with a taste for luxurious clothes and good food, he had renounced his possessions to the dismay of his father, and embarked on begging for food and for stones to rebuild a small church.

Like Saint Francis, we too are pilgrims on a journey. We take different paths, but we go to the same God. We will all learn eventually that we need to take nothing on our journey. Everything will be left behind. Some learn this later than others. I have to confess that I am accumulating many things in my pilgrimage. I do not travel light. But sometimes a glimpse of someone dying, leaving with nothing, leaving the same way we all came to earth, gives me pause to think. Truly I need to learn to relinquish my hold on possessions, to make my baggage lighter and lighter.

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain that which he cannot lose." (Jim Elliot, from his diary, Oct. 28, 1949)