Acts 21:12-16: in context

Paul is on the last leg of his journey to Jerusalem, and the warnings have been piling up. A prophet has just tied his own hands and feet with Paul's belt and announced that this is what will happen to Paul in Jerusalem. So everyone around him, his traveling companions and the local believers, begins to plead with him not to go. And their pleading is hard for him to bear, precisely because it comes from love. What are you doing, he says, weeping and breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be bound, but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus. The tears of people who care about him are almost harder to resist than the danger itself.

But Paul will not be turned. He is convinced this road is where his calling leads, even though it leads into chains, and he sets his face to it. And when his friends see they cannot change his mind, they do a beautiful thing: they stop arguing and let him go, saying, the Lord's will be done. It is the same surrender Jesus had prayed in another garden, not my will but yours. There is a real tension in this little scene that anyone following a hard call will recognize. The people who love us most will sometimes beg us to spare ourselves, to take the safer road, and they will mean it entirely for our good. And sometimes the faithful thing is to press on toward the cost anyway, and to trust the ones who love us to release us into the Lord's will rather than hold us back from it.

Paul's friends begged him, out of love, to avoid the road that led to his chains, and he went anyway. Is there a hard, called thing I am being talked out of by people who love me and want to spare me, and can we both rest in the Lord's will be done?