By Russ Johnson
There is a butcher in Tuscany
named Dario Cecchini.
His family had been doing this
for four generations.
Dario wanted out.
He went off to veterinary school
because, as he put it,
I wanted to care for animals,
not kill them.
Then his father died.
Dario came home
grieving the man he adored,
responsible for his siblings,
and completely unprepared
to take over the family business.
But he remembered something
his father had told him:
If you ever need help, find Orlando.
He’ll show you the way.
Orlando had selected meat
for Dario’s father for decades.
Dario told him,
When I’m cutting meat,
I feel great pain.
Orlando looked at him and said:
It’s not about cutting meat!
Then he took Dario to the farms.
To the homes of the people
who raised the animals.
He let him see
the whole life of the thing
before it ever became food.
There Dario discovered,
The butcher has a path of life
beside the animals.
Not detached from them.
Suddenly he understood
what his father had been doing.
But he still had a problem.
His customers only wanted steak.
It was all they knew.
And Dario didn’t think it was right
to kill an animal for a steak.
He tried explaining that
to his customers.
They weren’t interested.
So Dario had an idea:
Stop explaining it.
Put it on a plate.
He opened a restaurant
called Solociccia — Just Meat.
One communal table
serving every part of the cow
people considered less noble.
No steak.
An international chef named Samin Nosrat
described what it was like to eat there.
You sit down to partake
in thingsyou would have never considered.
But when you taste the meat,
the larger fears dissolve,
and you're deliciously surprised.
People leave there,
and they're changed.
Dario discovered something
Jesus seemed to understand perfectly:
Some things have to be tasted
before they can be trusted.
And sometimes the only thing
strong enough to challenge
what we already believe
is an experience that doesn’t fit it.
For most of his first-century audience,
Jesus looked like a Rabbi.
A teacher.
Someone to imitate.
To follow closely enough
that eventually
you could do what he did.
Spiritual Yoda.
But make it kosher.
Which is why discipleship was viewed,
as it often is today,
as a self-improvement project
with Jesus as the target.
Help people become like Jesus.
One spiritual discipline at a time.
There's just one problem.
Rabbis don't forgive sins
like they own the place.
Rabbis don't flip tables in the temple
and call it their Father's house
like they have every right
to rearrange the furniture.
Rabbis don't eat with prostitutes,
touch lepers without a second thought,
or walk out of their own grave.
But a Savior does.
Which is why Jesus
never called himself a Rabbi.
Eighty-one times
he called himself the Son of Man —
a title his audience recognized immediately
as a claim to divine identity. (Mark 10:45)
Not a teacher to imitate.
A Savior to trust.
Which changes everything.
When the crowd pressed him,
just tell us what to do,
give us the program,
give us something we can execute —
he answered like a man
completely uninterested
in building a curriculum:
"This is the work of God: that you believe in the one he has sent."(John 6:29)
Not perform.
Not imitate.
Believe him.
Trust him.
Which means the emphais
Jesus placed on discipleship
was never about producing
better imitators.
It was always about
helping people
trust someone worth trusting.
Knowledge matters.
You can’t trust what you don’t know.
But knowing something is true
isn’t the same as trusting it.
Trust grows when what we know
gets risked in real life.
Which explains why Jesus
spent so much time
around ordinary tables.
Eating.
Asked questions.
Let people ask theirs.
Told stories without explaining every detail.
Stayed in conversations
long enough for what was true
to become something people could trust.
Discipleship happened
in the middle of life.
Which is why his final words
probably didn’t land on the disciples
with the weight they carry for us:
Go and make disciples. Baptize them. Teach them to obey what I’ve taught you. (Matt. 28:19–20)
We hear stages, sermons, curriculum.
Someone qualified enough
to teach someone less qualified.
They heard Jesus describing
what they had just spent years
doing with him.
So when Jesus told them
to make disciples,
he wasn't creating a program to execute.
He was telling them to keep going.
The word translated “go” is poreuthentes.
It's not a command
barked at troops before a campaign.
It's a participle.
It means as you are going
about your day.
The word translated “make disciples” —
mathēteuō —
doesn't mean recruit converts
for the benefit of a local organization.
It means help others see
and trust what is true.
Right where you are.
You can't manufacture that.
It's introducing a friend
to the best taco truck you've ever found.
Not because you work for the taco truck.
Not because you get something
when they show up.
Because you found something
worth tasting and you couldn't
not tell someone.
Then there’s the words “baptize them.”
You.
Because baptism was never meant
to require a building,
a microphone,
or someone with Pastor
in front of their name.
It requires water.
Someone who believes Jesus.
And another person
willing to get wet with them.
So when someone you love
wants to be baptized,
you don’t have to outsource it.
Find a pool. Beach. Lake.
A bathtub if necessary.
Say what’s true.
Put them under.
Bring them back up.
Try not to drop them.
Then go eat something.
Jesus put baptism
in the hands of ordinary people
because that’s where he put discipleship.
Which brings us
to where Jesus said,
“teach them to observe
everything I have commanded you.”
The engine hears that as:
a list.
A standard.
Something to execute correctly
so you finally know where you stand.
But the word Jesus used is tēreō,
which means to treasure.
To hold close.
The way you hold something
from someone you love
until it becomes part
of how you see everything.
Jesus wasn't adding new rules
to the ones everyone was already failing.
He was saying:
as you go through life
step into ordinary conversations
so you can teach others
to treasure what I've shown you.
It’s something worth keeping close.
Which is what Scripture
has been saying the whole time.
Just not in the way
many of us heard it.
Take Romans 12:2.
"Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."
Sounds like a command.
Until you notice
the transformation is passive.
Not something we're manufacturing.
Something happening to us
as we learn to treasure
what is true.
And 1 Peter 1:16.
"Be holy as I am holy."
Peter is quoting Leviticus.
Where holy —
qadosh —
doesn't mean morally perfect.
It means whole.
Complete.
Fully what you were made to be.
Which means Peter
isn't raising the bar.
He's describing
what we already are in Jesus.
And inviting us to live like it.
The transformation happens
when we stop running
the old story
long enough for something true
to come to the surface.
Which happens around tables
where someone finally stops performing
and starts pointing.
Somewhere where honesty
is safer than hiding,
and trust has somewhere to grow.
That’s the journey —
a way of life
where discipleship happens
through open-ended conversations
among friends.
So go be that friend.
Make room.
Ask a real question.
Tell the truth first.
Listen without trying to fix anyone.
Share what you’ve learned.
Pass on resources like this one
to help people see another way.
Invite them to trust what’s true
when they forget.
And when someone starts
to taste the freedom you’ve found,
keep pointing.
That’s discipleship.