There is a question I have found myself returning to over the last few years:

At what cost do you stay?

Over the last few years, there have been significant seasons in both my personal and professional life when, if I am honest, I didn’t want to stay.

Leaving would have been easier. At times, I desperately wanted to leave.

And yet I had a strong sense that God was asking me to stay.

So I stayed.

Those seasons eventually ended in very different ways, but both left their mark on me. I don’t regret trying to be obedient to what I believed God was asking of me. But neither can I pretend that obedience came without consequences.

It cost me.

More, perhaps, than I understood at the time.

And looking back has left me wrestling with a question that I suspect is more complicated than some of our Christian language allows:

At what cost are we called to stay?

There is, of course, something deeply uncomfortable about Christianity.

Jesus never promised that following him would make our lives easier.

Quite the opposite.

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” Luke 9:23

Those words are so familiar that perhaps we sometimes forget how extraordinary they are.

The first disciples discovered just how costly that calling could become. They left homes, livelihoods and security. The New Testament tells stories of imprisonment, persecution, rejection, beatings and enormous personal sacrifice.

Paul’s catalogue of suffering in 2 Corinthians 11 is almost overwhelming.

And at the centre of our faith is Jesus himself, walking towards Jerusalem knowing what awaited him there.

Christian discipleship has never been built around the avoidance of suffering.

Sometimes obedience costs us enormously.

Sometimes God does ask us to remain somewhere when every instinct within us wants to run.

Sometimes faithfulness looks like staying.

I believe that.

But I have also come to believe that this truth needs to be handled with extraordinary care.

Because staying can cost you

There is a romantic way of talking about perseverance when you are not the person having to persevere.

We celebrate resilience.

We preach about endurance.

We tell people to remain faithful.

We quote, “Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” Hebrews 12:1

And all of that is biblical.

But what happens when staying begins to change you?

What happens when the cost isn’t simply inconvenience or tiredness, but something much deeper?

What happens when staying begins to affect your psychological wellbeing, your confidence, your sense of yourself?

That is where this question has become personal for me.

Because I can look back at seasons of my life and say, with complete sincerity:

I stayed because I believed God asked me to.

And I can also say:

Staying damaged me.

For a while, I found those two statements difficult to hold together.

Surely, if I was doing God’s will, it shouldn’t have hurt me like that?

Or perhaps the opposite: if obedience is meant to be costly, maybe the damage was simply the price of faithfulness.

I’m increasingly unconvinced by either answer.

The Bible is more complicated than “stay”

Because when I look again at Scripture, I notice something interesting.

Yes, Jesus stayed on the road to Jerusalem.

But Jesus also withdrew.

When people sought to kill him before his time, he did not simply remain and allow them to do so. He moved away. He escaped hostile situations. He crossed to the other side.

Paul suffered extraordinary things for the Gospel.

But Paul also escaped Damascus by being lowered through a window in a basket.

And when Jesus sent out his disciples, he didn’t tell them to remain indefinitely wherever they went.

There were circumstances in which they were told to leave.

“If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet.”

Apparently, leaving was not always failure.

Sometimes leaving was obedience.

That matters.

Because perhaps the Christian question isn’t:

How much suffering can I tolerate before I am allowed to leave?

Perhaps the question is:

What does faithfulness look like here, now?

And that is much harder.

The danger of turning suffering into virtue

Christians have to be careful here.

Because there is a difference between accepting the cost of discipleship and believing that suffering itself proves our faithfulness.

They are not the same thing.

The cross is central to Christianity, but Christianity is not a religion in which destruction is inherently holy.

Jesus said that he came that people might have life, and have it abundantly.

The God who calls people to costly obedience is also the God who leads people beside still waters and restores their souls.

Scripture contains wilderness and promised land.

Martyrdom and escape.

Perseverance and release.

Staying and leaving.

And perhaps maturity is learning that none of those things, by themselves, proves whether we are being faithful.

You can leave because you are frightened.

But you can also stay because you are frightened.

You can leave because God is calling you onwards.

And you can stay because God has asked you to remain.

Neither staying nor leaving is automatically the courageous choice.

The question is obedience.

Sacrifice or self-destruction?

Perhaps this is the distinction I have wrestled with most.

Christianity unquestionably calls us to sacrifice.

But are sacrifice and self-destruction the same thing?

I don’t think they are.

Sacrifice gives something precious because something greater is being served. Self-destruction gradually consumes the person doing the giving.

And perhaps, from the inside, those two things can sometimes feel remarkably similar.

Both can hurt.

Both can require endurance.

Both can involve surrendering things we desperately want to hold onto.

Which means pain itself cannot be the test of whether something is God’s will.

We cannot simply say, “This is costing me terribly, therefore I must be being faithful.”

Nor can we say, “This is costing me terribly, therefore God cannot possibly be asking it of me.”

The Christian story will not allow either conclusion so easily.

Instead, we are left with discernment.

With prayer.

With Scripture.

With wise voices around us.

And with the sometimes frightening possibility that the answer God gives us today might not be the answer he gave us yesterday.

So, at what cost do you stay?

I wish I had a neat answer.

Perhaps once I would have said: whatever it costs.

I’m less certain now.

Not because I believe obedience should be comfortable.

And not because I want a Christianity without sacrifice.

But because I have learned that human beings are not infinitely expendable resources in the purposes of God.

There may be moments when obedience genuinely requires enormous sacrifice.

There may even be moments, as the history of the Church demonstrates, when faithfulness costs someone their life.

But that cannot mean that every destructive situation should be endured simply because endurance sounds Christian.

Sometimes the courage is staying.

Sometimes the courage is leaving.

And perhaps one of the hardest spiritual disciplines is knowing the difference.

Looking back, I don’t regret the version of me who stayed.

She was trying, sometimes desperately, to be faithful to God.

She believed obedience mattered more than comfort.

I still believe that.

But I also have compassion for what that obedience cost her.

Perhaps that is one of the things I am learning about discipleship.

Following Jesus isn’t simply about asking:

“Can I endure this?”

Nor even:

“How much am I prepared to sacrifice?”

It is continually returning to Jesus and asking:

“Are you still asking me to stay?”

Because yesterday’s call to remain does not necessarily answer today’s question.

And sometimes the God who once said stay may eventually say:

It’s time to go.