GET RISKY

When we risk our lives to run after Christ, we discover the safety that is found only in his sovereignty, the security that is found only in his love, and the satisfaction that is found only in his presence.

— Radical, David Platt

A FEW MILES across town stands a church with one of those big signs that showcases inspiring or condemning blurbs via clipped-on plastic letters. In regular rotation is the ominous "God is always watching," and though it might be intended in a "You're never alone!" sentiment, I always read it with a rumble of dread, glancing over my shoulder and warily checking the sky. I assume these blanket statements, entirely divorced from all context, do not compel sinners through the church doors, much less to the saving grace of Jesus. I'm confident we can do better than this, but it's only the first paragraph of my story, and already I digress.

A perkier line in the church's message rotation is, "God is all we need!"

I can't argue with this one, but I sure want to.

The bare-naked reality is that I haven't experienced a single moment in my life where all I had was God. I came close, though, the night a few years back when I was alone in my hotel room in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I was part of a group of influences doing PR for Mocha Club and fashionABLE, two gutsy, forward-t hinking nonprofit groups that work to fight poverty throughout twelve countries in Africa. My team had been carefully curated to include impossibly cool and savvy women whose effortless style was in no way dulled by third-world surroundings. Aside from my travel mates' exceptional kindness and unflappable fashion sense, several were also legitimately famous.

Meanwhile I had packed for comfort and didn't own a smartphone.

The day before, when one of them asked to see a picture of my family, I had pulled actual paper snapshots from my wallet and passed them around the table to the sound of polite crickets. Never had I been so certain about the full scope of my social inadequacies. I felt ill, and I didn't yet know that actual vomiting was closing in on my horizon.

That night as I sat in my hotel room, separated by entire continents from the comfort of my home and my people, I was green at the gills and feeling like the only high schooler still wearing a training bra.

Everything in me wanted to run to my husband, Cory, or to the solace of my parents. Heck, the persistently friendly produce guy from Kroger would have been useful in the pinch I was in. I needed a real person, someone with skin, who knew things about me and loved me anyway, or at the very least remembered how I prefer my watermelons. Any one of them would have helped. But time zones worked against me, and I found myself entirely alone in the throes of a personal minibreakdown.

My only plan for survival was to endure the night by escaping into sleep, just as I had endured countless family road trips throughout my adolescence. Though my strategy may have worked with a fifteen-hour, midwinter trip back in 1992, on this night it proved wholly impossible.

Somewhere between the hours of 3:00 and 4:00 a.m., it struck me that God was all I had, and he would have to be enough, just as he'd always promised. (That it took me so long to acknowledge this truth speaks to my spiritual condition in a way that we simply do not have time to explore.)

And he was. God was totally enough. He got me through that night, but the hard truth is, he wasn't truly all I had. For one thing, my night of transcontinental angst was spent hunkered down in a beautiful hotel set against the backdrop of a country chewed up by a history of poverty and victimization. I swallowed down meds with clean bottled water while surfing the web from a laptop computer that had traversed the globe in a special case meant to ensure its safe transport. In terms of personal catastrophe, I was doing all right, and that was before I remembered I had God too.

In a world where we possess the power to distract or buy our way out of most discomfort, can we ever really mean it when we say God is all we need? Can untested words ring anything but hollow from our lips?

Faithful and capable folk, we parrot familiar phrases from a place of theory rather than practice and warm ourselves by their feel-good, holy glow. But please don't press us. We don't really know if we actually believe them. No matter what happens, no matter what hard thing we face or how we run to God at the very end after we've exhausted all other options, no matter how misunderstood or hurt or even physically ill we may be, we hold plenty of self-concocted painkillers to buffer us from the ravages of real-world living.

There are the obvious safety nets, like heated homes, city water, and the FDA. But what about stable, prolific employment opportunities? Houses of worship we attend without risk to our lives? Then there are the dead bolts and password-protected financial accounts. Speaking of which, how often do we apply our credit lines like a salve to our wounds?

We have relentless updates on the proper positioning of our newborns in their cribs and three-point harnessed car seats for our toddlers. We have EpiPens, expiration dates, full-coverage insurance, low-VOC paint, and 401(k)s. There are color-coded systems for pollen counts, UV rays, and air travel. We have helmets and knee pads, accountants and pastors, and tiny bottles of Thieves essential oils knocking around in our seasonal purses.

There are other things, too, like communities where we blend in perfectly, churches where we won't ever feel uncomfortable, schools where our children are promised an excellent (and free) education, and neighbors we don't actually know, yet trust all the same, primarily because they remind us of ourselves.

We stand in worship services and sing our hearts out about things like faith and trusting God in deep waters. We say God is all we need, but what we really mean is, "All we need is God, our family, the promise of safety, and money." We roll everything into a ball. We smoosh it together. Our money and our family came from God, right? So it's fine. They're essentially one and the same.

We sing like we mean it while we pray to God we'll never find out if we really do.

What would happen if everything but God were swept away? Would he really be enough? I'm confident I'll never find out, and I'm honest enough to admit that I hope I won't.

But I can tell you from experience that when just a small part of my world was swept away, it rocked me so hard my teeth rattled for months. It was utterly discombobulating. I had wound God so tightly with my externals, I wasn't sure how to separate the two. I didn't recognize this God who asked to be enough in the face of substantial financial loss and the mere thought of danger. This wasn't the God I wanted to need.

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