Is Discipleship Quibron or Dimetapp?

When I was a kid, I remember having to take two different liquid medicines for my asthma.  One was called Quibron.  It. Was. Nasty.

Quibron had to be the most foul thing I have ever tasted.  It was hard to keep it down as Mom tried to dispense it.  I can remember one scene from my childhood where Mom kept giving me a dose of Quibron and I would keep spitting it out.  I wasn’t trying to be mean, it was just a reaction to how gross this medicine was.

Then there was Dimetapp.  This medicine is used mostly as a cough medicine, but it could also be used for allergies and asthma as well.  Dimetapp was heaven compared to the hell of Quibron.  It was grape flavored, which was good in helping kids take their medicine, but possibly bad if kids start pretending they have a cough or an allergy to get another taste of that grape elixir.

Both medicines helped me when I was younger.  The only difference is one tasted really good and the other tasted foul.

For some reason today, I’ve seen a few things on the internet that dealt with the costs of following God.  God wasn’t all sweetness and light, no, God expected things from us and to follow God, it meant more about sacrifice than success.

All of this sounds good to me.  And yet, each time I heard this I felt uncomfortable and remembered my past.  When I was in college, the God I dealt with seemed to be one that said “no” a whole lot, especially when it came to anything sexual.  But it also seemed that God would make you do things you didn’t want to do.  God wasn’t fun.

I’m not advocating for a nice, benevolent God, one that is part and parcel of the Moral Theraputic Deism that seems so prevalent in American society.  And yet, I don’t want a God that is a joyless taskmaster, one that is calling me to a joyless life as well.  I don’t want to live with the guilt I faced as a young man, but I don’t want a God that has no impact on my life.

Is discipleship all about what we can’t do?  Or is it something more?  Can God expect more from us and it not always be about what we must give up?

I don’t have answers.  I just wanted to share my own thoughts.