To My Hindu Friend Who Feels the Weight of Family

Dear friend,

I'm not going to tell you it will be fine. I don't know that it will be, and you'd know I was lying if I said otherwise. You've watched your parents build a life on the other side of the world, or hold a tradition together across a generation that half-forgot it, and some part of what you're weighing right now is whether following Jesus means handing them a grief they didn't sign up for. That fear is not small, and I won't pretend it is to make this letter easier to write.

What I won't soften

Jesus didn't soften it either, which is part of why I trust him with it. He said that anyone who comes to him has to love him more than father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters — more than his own life (Luke 14:26). He said plainly that he came to bring not peace but a sword, that his arrival would set a man against his own father, a daughter against her mother, and that a person's enemies could end up being members of his own household (Matthew 10:34–36). He never promised the people who followed him that their families would understand, approve, or stay unbroken. Anyone who tells you following Christ is a smooth, costless decision hasn't read the same red letters you'd be reading.

What I won't let you forget, either

Here's the part that matters just as much: Jesus's own family didn't understand him. His brothers didn't believe in him during his lifetime. At one point his own relatives went out to restrain him because they thought he'd lost his mind. Whatever this costs you, he isn't asking you to walk through something he never walked through himself. He knows exactly what it is to love a family that doesn't yet understand what he's doing in your life.

The family on the other side

📖 "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life." — Mark 10:29–30 (ESV)

Read that again slowly — most comfort offered to people in your position leaves the cost out entirely. He doesn't promise the cost won't be real — "with persecutions" sits right there in the same sentence as the hundredfold. But he also doesn't leave anyone with only the cost. A hundredfold family, now, in this life, not just someday. People who will actually be brothers and sisters to you, not a metaphor for a support group. I've watched it happen, more than once, for people who were sure they'd be walking into this completely alone.

You don't have to stop loving them

Nothing about following Christ requires you to love your parents less, dishonor them, or write them off. If anything, the same Scripture that calls you to Christ also calls you to honor your father and mother for as long as you live, whatever they decide about any of this. Following Jesus well usually looks less like a dramatic break and more like years of patient, visible faithfulness — loving them steadily enough, for long enough, that whatever they think of your faith, they can't say it made you love them less.

What I actually want to say

I don't know what this will cost you specifically, and I won't pretend to. I know it might be real, and I know it might be less than you fear, and I have no way to promise you which. What I can tell you is that you wouldn't be walking into it unknown, or unaccompanied, or loved any less by the people who matter most for having counted the cost before deciding anything.

Your friend, whatever you decide, and for as long as it takes you to decide it.

Primary Sources Referenced: Luke 14:25–27 • Matthew 10:34–39 • Mark 3:21 • John 7:5 • Mark 10:28–30 • Exodus 20:12

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.