Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that "when Christ calls a person, he bids him come and die." That's a hard saying. But then, the gospels are full of such sayings.
A few years ago, I was interviewed by a former student who was a reporter for our student-run campus newspaper. Knowing that I have taught many sections of ethics classes over the years, she asked "If you were to reduce the most important lessons of morality to one sentence, what would it be?" I had an immediate answer . . .
"Just as some of Jesus’ first century followers could not credit the presence of the risen Christ, so our own blindness, habit, and fear form a kind of constant fog that keeps us from seeing, and thereby believing in, the forms that grace takes in our everyday lives." Christian Wiman