I used to think strength meant standing alone. Independence was the currency of adulthood, the marker of someone who had "figured it out." But somewhere in the midst of my own striving, I discovered a truth that turned everything upside down: discipleship is followership, and it asks us to do the one thing our independent human nature resists most—listen, trust, and submit to someone else.
This realization didn't come easily. It came through frustration, through the exhausting weight of trying to navigate life with only my own reasoning as a compass. I had been taught to question, to analyze, to forge my own path. And while human reasoning has its place, I found it constantly inviting me toward a kind of isolation—a subtle lie that whispered I could do this on my own, that following another was weakness, that true growth meant self-reliance.
But discipleship requires something entirely different. It requires a person to actually listen to a teacher, not just intellectually agree with them from a safe distance. Real listening—the kind that shapes you—demands vulnerability. It means opening yourself to influence, allowing someone else's wisdom to reshape your assumptions. And that kind of listening, I've learned, only happens when trust is present.
Trust, though, is a fragile thing. It can be easily broken by a careless word, a failed promise, a moment of hypocrisy. We've all been burned by people we trusted, left standing in the wreckage wondering if we were foolish to believe in the first place. Our broken nature—our capacity to disappoint and be disappointed—should actually give us reason to follow Jesus. Because if we can't fully trust other humans (and we can't, not completely), and we can't fully trust ourselves (evidence suggests we shouldn't), then we're left with a choice: continue stumbling forward in our own strength, or surrender to Someone whose nature isn't broken.
The problem is that independence from Christ, while culturally celebrated, is doomed to damnation and frustration. I don't mean damnation only in the eternal sense, though that's part of it. I mean the daily kind—the slow death of meaning, the accumulation of regrets, the haunting sense that we're missing something essential. And the frustration? It's relentless. The frustration of unmet expectations, of relationships that crumble, of purposes that shift like sand.
Here's what I've discovered: frustration can be mitigated but not eliminated by following Jesus. This was hard for me to accept at first. I wanted discipleship to be a magic formula, a way to bypass suffering entirely. But following Jesus as a true disciple means submission, and submission doesn't remove us from the hardships of being human. It reframes them. It gives them context and meaning. The frustration remains—we still face loss, confusion, disappointment—but it no longer defines us.
Submission needs trust, and trust in Jesus is everlasting and ongoing. It's not a one-time decision but a daily practice of releasing control, of choosing dependence over independence. Some mornings, this feels natural, almost effortless. Other days, it feels like wrestling. But this is the nature of ongoing followership—it's not static. It's a relationship that deepens through seasons, through failures and renewals, through moments of clarity and stretches of doubt.
And here's the beautiful paradox: ongoing followership can lead to true discipleship. The very act of following—day after day, year after year—transforms us into disciples. Not because we've mastered anything, but because we've stayed close to the Teacher. We've let His voice become more familiar than our own anxious thoughts. We've discovered that the strength we were searching for all along wasn't in standing alone, but in learning to walk beside Someone who never stops leading us toward wholeness.
Discipleship is contrary to everything our culture teaches us about becoming ourselves. But maybe that's exactly the point. Maybe becoming ourselves was never meant to be a solo journey. Maybe true strength has always looked like trust, and true wisdom has always required us to follow.