What if God doesn’t have something great in store for your life?

Is He still enough? Will you still praise Him? Follow Him? Abandon all other things for Him? Preach His Son’s life and death and resurrection? Even as you suffer, year after year, seeing no great success in your own life?

The American Dream is that God has a great plan for your life. A plan for good. A plan to make you prosper. A plan to use you greatly. It’s summed up by the highly tattoo-able verse from Jeremiah: “ ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’ ” (29:11).

Like all parts of the Bible, this is a good verse. But I don’t think God meant it in the way we hear it. The original “you” He was speaking to was Israel, and in the same breath God told them that His prospering of them was going to happen after they were slaves for the next seventy years. The entire generation of people He was speaking to were going to be dead before this nation glimpsed any grand future.

The way of Jesus is not the American dream. He eventually has great plans for us when He returns, but for now, He might not have great plans for you. His plan might be very painful. It might be lowly. It might look insignificant. It might look nothing like the American Dream so many of us have confused with the Gospel our whole lives.

Life will be easier if you don’t follow Jesus—because you can look out for your own interests if you don’t follow Him. You can protect yourself from pain. You can spend all of your might and energy on success. You can rise higher, attain growth, and achieve your destiny—but not with Jesus.

To follow Jesus is to follow Him on a road of pain and suffering. It’s a road of humility, not exaltation. It’s a road of thinking of others, without qualification, as being more important than yourself. It’s a road of suffering for others—even those others we don’t think are worth suffering for, the ones who are lowly and despicable and have only ever given us disrespect and pain. It’s a road that ended in a bloody, shameful spectacle for the One we follow.

But it’s the only road that leads to life. So what if God doesn’t have something great in store for your life? Are you still following?

If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. — Jesus, in Mark 8:34-35