risk is right

9.21.12

Moving countries is an abstract, surreal idea until all your meager worldly possessions are out of your closets and cabinets, off your walls, and tucked into cardboard boxes.  For months I’ve heard the polite question:

“Sooo!  How are you feeling about going to England?”

I’ve had one consistent answer: I don’t know.  Perhaps that’s owing to the honest truth that the sentimental bone in my body is probably about the size of my smallest toe rather than my femur.  Or it could be due to the fact that just two days ago, John and I had to again address the question of whether I should still plan to come now, despite the obstacles and risks.  But whether I can succinctly define my emotional state now or not, the reality of the situation is at least a little more concrete, and fresh realities tend to effectively produce fresh emotions, fresh ponderings, and fresh journeys with God.

Empty bookcases and walls have the most startling effect.  My library bursting from the shelves creates an odd sense of security; the hard covers create an illusion of life and lifestyle being secure, and the dog-eared paperbacks lend a sense of familiarity and comfort, as if the strange unknowns in the world have their mysteries unraveled and put to rest on the specially marked pages.  Now, though, the only thing remaining on those shelves is a layer of dust so thick I could write messages in it. (Really…do you dust behind all your books?) And it’s a sharp reminder that safety is a myth and security an illusion, as John Piper describes it.  On the contrary, life is full of risk, and if we do not risk, we waste our lives.

Risk is right.  This is a welcome reminder that I must deliberately make to myself at times.  It’s not always.  Usually it’s when I see that another fellow graduate finished graduate school and is settling nicely into a promising career.  Or when others who are four, five, six years younger than me post photos from their weddings or their second child’s first birthday.  Or when I sit in my bare room with my feet on a cardboard box, contemplating this reality: I am about to move to another country.  I will not have an income.  I do not really know what I will do when I get there.  I do not know when I will come back.  When I come back, I will have no car, no home, no certain career, and God forbid, no health insurance.  If you ask me about a 401K, I will have no option but to stare at you with all the personality and intelligence of a dead fish.  Yes, I am profoundly aware of the risks I am taking with my 25-year-old life, risks that no sensible, middle-class American college graduate really ought to make.

Why, then?  Well…God spoke.

As I close the tenth overstuffed box of the day, I wonder how Joshua and Caleb felt staring at giants on their west sides and an unbelieving people on their east.  I wonder if underneath their unwavering commitment to the mandate and promise of God, they felt a little unsteady, pleading inwardly that God would, indeed, prove himself consistent to what he spoke.

And I wonder about Abraham, the father of our faith.  Was leaving the familiarity of home and family and traditional lifestyle and traditional gods as simple as telling Hagar to pack up the kitchen supplies and hitch up the camels?  As Abraham broke away from convention and headed into some vast unknown, did he have any questions for the God who would become his Friend?

Selfishly, I hope there were some startling realities of the unknown that they had to overcome.  I find my courage again thinking of these men and women “of whom the world was not worthy”.  They lived nomadically, knowing this world is not home.  And faith- that is, obedient action to that which God spoke- determined their lives and made mine possible.

So the empty bookshelves lead to me a more resounding reality: this world is not my home.  I do celebrate the marriages and children and careers and lovely homes and great cars of my peers.  I believe these things can be gifts from God and may be parts of his perfect will for many lives.  Roads that include these things are full of their own risks and potentially, adventures in God.  But on September 21, 2012, the road God has asked me to take is one that is unconventional and seemingly unwise…a waste, some would say.  But heaven is home, not this room full of boxes, so I can find courage to act in faith like Abraham, ‘not knowing where I am going’.  And the God “who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were” will, I trust, prove himself consistent with what he has spoken.