And he said to them, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not have two tunics. (Luke 9:3 ESV) Traveling with a lot of baggage sucks. It especially stinks when you’re traveling during rush hour and you got more oversized bags than arms. But add those to having less personal space between you and the smelly person next to you than an ant to the earth and traveling not only stinks (literally) its also very miserable. I need to define two ideas for us, “baggage” and “life journey.” Let me define “life journey” for us: it is any new relationship, career choice, and life altering decision we make. Simply put, it is every single act and step in life that puts us on a certain trajectory. Now “baggage”: a kind of bondage to the past that can contaminate new and potentially more positive interactions. Now imagine going on a lifelong journey. Would you ever travel on a lifelong journey as hap-hazardously as you did the last time you went home for Christmas with more baggage than you need for a weekend with the folks? Obviously none of us would intentionally do that. But then again, isn’t that what we do almost every single time we embark on a new life journey? We are all carrying years and years of accumulated baggage through all our life journeys and it is stinking up our experiences, if not making us entirely miserable. Jesus quiet literally said to his disciples, “don’t carry ANY baggage!” You see, he was sending his disciples out to do something with their lives and he didn’t want anything hampering their progress or ruining their experiences. In fact, he basically told his disciples to just go and do what they knew God had prepared them to do and forget what they were carrying or losing track of. The sad thing is that we’re Jesus’ disciples too. We’re being sent out to do what we were created to do in God, here in our spheres of the world; but we keep dragging along our baggage and because of it, we keep losing out on our mission– our purpose in life, that thing God has us to do. We need to stop bringing along our oversized carry-on baggage into our new life journeys. There’s so much we need to do, keep both arms available to do something with them.