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.

We are all called to be missionaries for Jesus. If we think we have to go to a foreign land to be a missionary, we are sadly mistaken. We don’t have to pack up and leave, we can go visit our neighbor. We can go to the hospital and comfort a friend or even a stranger. Our prayers are powerful. If we cannot go to the QC Jail, we can pray for the inmates there. David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary doctor, undertook three extensive expeditions throughout much of the African continent to bring Christianity to the people there. How did he start? When he was a little boy, he was helping the organist while a preacher talked about the need to send missionaries to Africa to some old women. He decided then and there he would go. The old women were his prayer warriors. 

Like Saint Francis and David Livingstone, 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. So let’s accumulate heavenly treasure while we can. Like St. Paul Miki, whose feast we celebrate today, let us use up to our last breath to call fellow pilgrims to Jesus. When he was martyred in Japan, St. Paul Miki professed his faith at the cross. “As I come to this supreme moment of my life, I do gladly pardon the Emperor and all who have sought my death. I beg them to seek baptism and be Christians themselves”. 

"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)