Man Up

One of the biggest things we’ve all been learning on the Race is about identity.  It’s more than just figuring out how we’ve been put together, or where our passions lie.  Our identity is more than the sum of our experiences, more than our hobbies or job, and much more than a name.  We’re learning to live consciously as children of God, and that’s not always easy.

It’s taken me a long time to come to grips with this one simple fact: I am more than just some dude, wandering around wondering how to make something of myself.  I have the Spirit of Almighty God living and active inside of me, and that is all that is necessary to make me a man of God.  I’m starting to really believe this, and it’s something that’s continuing to stretch me.

When I think of a man of God, I turn to the Bible.  Who are the greatest men in the Bible?  Jesus, of course – the perfect man.  There’s David, the man God said was after His own heart.  Paul, apostle to the Gentiles and author of much of the New Testament.  What God’s been taking me through lately has parallels in the lives of these men, and while I know I’m a long way from really ‘getting it’ I do know I’m going down the right path.

Peter was the apostle to the Jewish people, Paul was called to the Gentiles. David was asked to lead God’s people as king.  We say that God has a plan for all of His servants, but there’s more to the plan than just ‘live long and prosper’ – God’s plan involves some kind of specific life calling for everyone.  That call looks different for everyone, but it’s always specifically tailored to the way God made us.  I’m not saying everyone’s suposed to be clergy.  Some people are gifted specifically for pastoral ministry, for evangelism or discipleship – but some people aren’t.  Some people are called to be farmers, or office workers, or marine biologists.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong or lesser in any way about lay jobs.  The essential thing is to understand where God calls you and then to fulfil His purpose in placing you there.  In all honesty, I don’t have enough life experience to properly understand the concept well enough to explain it, but fortunately the point I want to make doesn’t rely completely on that.  All I’m really trying to say is that I understand that there is such a thing as a call.  I don’t know what mine is yet (although I continue to pray for guidance) but this is a huge step forward.  For most of my life I figured God’s plan was something vague that sort of lined up with the American Dream:

It’s not exactly that I was WRONG – for all I know God might have that in mind – but I was missing the point.  God leaves us completely free to live our own life with whatever choices we want to make, of course, but there are choices He WANTS us to make.  Choices that line up with the best plan He has for our lives.  I get that now, more or less – and for the first time in a long time I’m ready to dream BIG.  I’m not talking about revisiting my childhood desire to be an astronaut.  I’m talking about dreaming God-sized dreams.  It turns out that there is an incredible plan He’s got for me, and I can whittle away my life thinking that it’s unknowable or poorly defined

I can pursue what He has for me and understand what it really means to be fulfilled.  I don’t know WHAT my calling is – but now at least I know I have one.

Chasing that calling down is going to be a tough job, and it’s going to take some real manly qualities.  Like courage.

There’s no shortage of Biblical acts of courage.  David facing off against Goliath, Daniel staring down a night with hungry lions.  Kings and prophets and shipwrecked apostles have throughout the Bible encountered certain death and simply shrugged.  It’s part of being a man to spit in the face of danger.  It’s part of being a man of God to live a life unafraid of anything.  Courage can look like so much more than just not flinching in the face of death.  It’s faith to gather in a room when Jesus says to hang out and wait for a gift.  It’s courage to take that gift and go preach to a huge crowd of people who don’t even speak your language when your highest level of education is knowing how to fix a fishing net.  Courage is not the act of laughing in the face of danger.  Courage is what happens when we stare FEAR itself straight in the face and make it back down.  We’re most scared of the unknown, the ‘what ifs’ we can’t answer, the moments in life where the only result we can think of is too terrifying to contemplate.  That’s where courage comes in.  Faith is essential, central to the Christian life, absolutely vital to everything I’ve been doing for the last 9 months.  But faith is just the beginning.  Faith will get you on the path.  Faith will lead you to the next step.  Faith will guide you through life.  Faith will get you to Heaven intact.  Faith is required for a Christian.  But faith alone only gets you to the edge of the cliff – and when God whispers, “jump!” you can continue to walk in JUST faith along the edge, inching towards Heaven terrified to fall, or you can take hold of courage and jump.

I’m learning courage.  I’m learning that the spiritual walk with God is not about a smoothly paved golden street with the pearly gates at the end.  That’s the path of fear.  That’s the path of succumbing, of being lesser than the man God has called me to be.  I want – and God has been ever more faithful than I ever dreamed to provide it – an off-road adventure with God.  Bumpy, rocky, always uphill.  Sometimes so dark all I can see is the One in front of me, beckoning me on.  Sometimes so rough it’s all I can do to just hold on to that Voice saying, “Come with me!  It’s beautiful where we’re going!”  Sometimes we come to the edge of a cliff.  Sometimes I hear that patient voice of love whispering in my ear, “Jump.”  There’s never a second part to that.  There’s no, “Jump, and I’ll catch you.”  There’s only the command.  There’s only the sharp rocks at the bottom, the cliff edge, and the Voice that thunders like a waterfall, “JUMP!”  I don’t need to hear, “I’ll catch you.”  Not now.  When I left for the Race I had gigantic medical bills hanging over my head.  Then I heard God tell me, “Just go and I’ll take care of all this.”  I had to hold pretty tight to that promise many times in the Race, especially as funding deadlines loomed.  But here I am, having taken the plunge, and God caught me.  Those bills are paid, forgiven, erased.  Of course, I’m now flat broke, I have no job, and I don’t even have a way to pay a cell phone bill when I get home – but I’m not paralyzed by fear any more.  Faith, and courage.

Speaking out is hard for me.  I’ve spent a lot of time speaking in front of people, and even more time speaking through the written word.  “Words are my thing,” I tell people, and it’s true.  What’s never been my thing is speaking out.  I’ve never believed I was ever important enough to have a say in what was going on.  I’d offer opinions and anecdotes in an effort to seem cool or knowledgeable, but actually spontaneously getting up in front of a group of my friends and saying something I knew God wanted me to say – that was NOT me.  That was scary.  I would rather have given an hour-long presentation in front of twenty thousand strangers than say three sentences in front of my 50-strong family in V squad.  The fear was so strong.  I’d be laughed at.  I’d say the wrong thing.  I’d stumble over my words.  It wouldn’t resonate.

That’s changing.  Twice now – once at training camp back in October, once at debrief in Nairobi a few weeks ago – I’ve heard God specifically ask me to speak.  I’ve had other times when my heart was disturbed, when I knew I needed to say something, but these two times were wildly different.  God gave me the exact words to say – they roared so loudly in my ears I couldn’t hear anything else.  I’d sit there, paralyzed by fear, terrified into indecision by the simple fact that what I spoke was going to stick with everyone for at least long enough to be evaluated.  Weighed.  JUDGED.  And if they judged me lacking, I’d have to deal with that for the rest of the Race.  Sure, I’m saying things that don’t hold up under the light of day.  These are just the thoughts that were going through my head in those moments, right before I jumped.  And I did jump.  I stood up, I shared God’s words from my heart – and I discovered something.  Nobody laughed.  Nobody mocked me.  Nobody came up afterwards and said, “that was pretty stupid what you said back there.”  God caught me.

Courage is awesome.  It’s about giving up control, about handing your life over to God and doing the things He asks that sometimes seem crazy, and usually seem scary.  The best thing about claiming courage though, is the result.  See, once you’ve actually taken a leap of faith or two, you start to be less worried about the outcome.  Fear falls away, and in its place you notice a confidence.  Of course, God keeps making the cliffs higher, keeps asking for a more complete surrender to Him, but they don’t seem any scarier with confidence.  I think I could best translate it into Biblical terms by calling it Hope.  Hope, when it’s talked about in the Bible, is not the, “oh I hope it doesn’t rain today and spoil my plans” sort of hope.  Not the nothing-I-can-do-about-it-let’s-just-hope-for-the-best sort of hope.  Hope, that fundamental quality of the Spirit, is so much more concrete than that.

It’s like this: I’m in a strange city, and I need to get from point A to point B.  I grab a bus schedule, check the routes, and head to the bus stop.  I arrive and there’s no bus in sight.  There are no people waiting.  I sit down on the bench and wait.  Some old guy comes up to me and says, “Sonny, there’s no bus here.  What are you doing?” and I reply, “I’m waiting for the bus.” 

      “The bus is coming.  See, right here in my hand is a piece of paper that says in seven minutes there will be a bus here to take me where I’m going.“

That’s Hope.  I can’t see my future.  I don’t yet know what my calling looks like.  I can’t see where my life will be two weeks from now, let alone two months.  But in my hand is a piece of paper – page 940 of my Bible – that tells me that for the rest of my life there will be a Guide to get me where I’m going.

Hope does not disappoint us.  Confidence.  I now know God will catch me when I jump.  That’s not why I jump.  That’s not why I follow God’s leading in the face of my fear.  It doesn’t take confidence to fight fear.  Confidence is the result of discovering that fear can be fought, and defeated.  I jump because of courage.  I don’t scream on the way down because of confidence.  Real Hope.

So, yeah.  That’s not all there is to being a man of God.  That’s not all there is to being a missionary.  That’s just where I am at the moment.  That’s what God’s calling me to do, to say, to be.  I finally understood something in a hotel conference room in Nairobi, eight months away from home and family and anything comfortable.