Being Unsafe for the Sake of Christ

I read the sentences and they echo over and over in my mind.

"Jesus died to save us, not to make us safe. No one ever got saved unless someone else was unsafe." ~ Ann VosKamp

It makes me think of the policeman I walked along the sidewalk with last week. He was just a bit in front of me so the words on his vest were in my vision for several minutes. "Bomb Squad." I caught up with him at the crosswalk and we laughed together as I asked if anyone was ever happy to see him enter their building. He answered no, but they were happy to see him walk away.

What drives someone to that kind of work? Knowing you are entering in when everyone around you and even a part of your own mind, I am sure, is calling you to run in the other direction. Is it love for your fellow man? Duty? Honor?

That small conversation has been haunting me. Or more truthfully, it has been challenging me. It has left me thinking, aren't we as Christ followers called to rush into the lives and places that everyone else wants to run away from?

And then I read that sentence. "No one EVER got saved unless someone else was unsafe."

There are Christians living "unsafe" all around us.

The brave and wonderful woman who started a home for sex trafficked girls, leaving her secure corporate high-paying job to depend daily on the grace of God. She is unsafe. The men who walk into the prison and tell of the untamed mercy and forgiveness of the Savior. They are unsafe. That soft spoken, tenderhearted woman serving the refugees in Kenya. She is unsafe. Those friends of ours who carry their Bibles onto the local and foreign mission fields. They are unsafe. 

Ask them if it's worth it, this unsafe style of living and every single one of them will tell you yes. They know from experience that risking their lives for Christ is the only way one really, truly lives.

So let's be done with being safe. All of us who wear Christ's name need to be finished with being so comfortable in the fact that we are heaven bound, that we do no earthly good.

Let's run towards the shattered hearts, the explosive personalities, the tattered lives. Isn't that exactly what Jesus did for us?

John 15:12-13  My command is this:  Love each other as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this:  to lay down one's life for one's friends.

Cyndi Word