Ostium Catholic

Jesus tells a crowd following him, presumably with some enthusiasm, that none of them has actually calculated the cost of what they're signing up for. A builder who starts a tower without the funds to finish it becomes the cautionary tale everyone in the neighborhood points to. Today's memorial is Charles Borromeo, a bishop who spent his career - and it was, in every practical sense, a career, run with real administrative competence - reforming how the Church formed its ministers, on the theory that willingness without preparation produces exactly the half-built towers Jesus describes.

There's a specific professional version of this miscalculation: taking on a role, a project, or a level of responsibility because the opportunity presented itself, without seriously counting whether you have what the role will actually demand. Ambition tends to treat every offered rung as self-evidently worth climbing. It rarely asks in advance what the view from up there will cost to maintain.

Paul's instruction the same night cuts against the anxiety this kind of calculation can produce: work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for God is the one who is at work in you, both to desire and to work. The counting isn't meant to paralyze. It's meant to replace blind momentum with an honest accounting of what you're actually building and whether you can actually finish it.

Name one current commitment you took on without seriously counting its real cost. Do the honest math now, even if it's uncomfortable, and decide what actually needs to change.

Lord, I've climbed rungs without checking what they'd cost to hold. Give me the discipline to count honestly, and the confidence that you're doing the deeper work regardless. Amen.