Don’t Be Afraid
In early January 2007, my study group was discussing what it meant to be radically available to God. The idea was that you have to give up everything for God, that you have to listen to what He is calling you to do. Somebody asked me what I thought about it.
“I’m going to be honest,” I replied. “I can’t say I can do that.”
“Why not?”
“What if God sends me somewhere like Africa. I’m never going to Africa!”
Famous last words. The group still teases me about saying that.
Traveling with a team to Russia in 2004 was my first step in a journey I had undertaken, but I still held many reservations inside. My next two mission trips were to South Africa and India. When I declared I would never go to Africa, I wasn’t referring to South Africa, which I viewed as a modern country. The first trip came in 2005 and was once again through Brentwood United Methodist Church. I visited several areas in South Africa, including visits to Durban, Pietermaritzburg, and Howick. I was also able to go to Mpophomeni, a native African area.
During the white rule of Africa, during the policy of racial segregation known as “apartheid,” this community experienced a lot of suffering. In Mpophomeni, a woman told me that the “police” showed up one day at her home when her husband had walked out of their house. They grabbed him, put a tire over him, and set the tire on fire. He burned to death right in front of her. I went back to that area a few more times (I had become chair of the committee that handled such projects for the church) and got to know several ladies and the chief of that area. We built a brick church there that still is used today, not only as a church but as a school.
To this day, Cape Town is one of the most beautiful places I’ve been.
In November 2005, I traveled to Calcutta, India. I was the president of our local Rotary club, so we traveled there for a service project. I had encountered some poverty in Russia, but it didn’t compare to the conditions in Calcutta. Thousands of people lived on the street. Sacred cows roamed the streets as skinny as rails, and monkeys jumped all over the place. Anytime I stepped out on the street, I was immediately surrounded by beggars and children clinging to my legs.
I remember going to the convent where Mother Teresa is buried. When the car pulled up to the curb, I had to walk across the sidewalk to get into the building. The moment I stepped out of the taxi, I was surrounded by beggars, pushing and clamoring for attention. Yet the moment my foot touched the entrance to the convent, everybody stopped. No one followed me to Mother Teresa’s tomb.
Both of these trips opened up my heart to the needs of the poorest of the poor in our world, and they made me start to experience a powerful, undeniable feeling deep in my soul. I began to feel like I was supposed to take a new path in life, that it was time to actually take that leap of faith that had been at the heart of God’s murmurs for so many years. It was time to commit my life—not just my vacations—to serving the world’s poor. Yet I still hadn’t fully surrendered to the thought of making this my life and going wherever I could be used. That’s why I admitted to my church group that I just couldn’t give everything over to the Lord. I didn’t want to be radically available to Him.
God did not give up on me. Instead, He started touching my heart. Night after night, I felt Him calling to me, nudging my spirit and whispering into my soul. I knew what I was being called to do, where I was being called to go, but I tried to fight it.
I was giving into my greatest fears.
Do you know what statement Christ made in the Bible more than any other? “Don’t be afraid.” He told his disciples this not to protect them, but to allow them to lead the lives they needed to live. Max Lucado talks about this in his aptly titled book, Fearless:
When safety becomes our god, we worship the risk-free life. Can the safety lover do anything great? Can the risk-averse accomplish noble deeds? For God? For others? No. The fear-filled cannot love deeply. Love is risky. They cannot give to the poor. Benevolence has no guarantee of return. The fear-filled cannot dream wildly. What if their dreams sputter and fall from the sky? The worship of safety emasculates greatness. No wonder Jesus wages such a war against fear.
I was waging my own war, refusing to let go. One night, I climbed out of bed at 3 a.m. and yelled in the darkness, “God, surely you don’t expect me to quit my job! I have no way of supporting myself!”
There are times in our lives that are monumental, and this was one for me. I was considering leaving a great career and diving into something where I had no experience. I thought about what it meant to call myself a Christian, and I decided I could either exhibit the
faith I had professed all my life, or retreat into a safe zone and live the rest of my life wondering, What if? I decided to go to the middle of the lake and jump.
After much prayer, I realized I could no longer ignore the unmistakable calling from God. I said this to God: “I’m going to go to the deep end of the pool, and I’m going to jump. And Lord, if you don’t catch me, I’m going to drown. Because I can’t swim.”
Two days later, I submitted my resignation…
I jumped. And you know what?
He caught me.
Taken from The Lamb of Wall Street by Karen Bruton. Copyright ©2021 by Karen Bruton. Used by permission of Forefront Books.
graduated from the University of North Carolina and holds an MBA from Wake Forest University. She spent more than twenty-five years as a vice president and corporate controller of two corporations. In any week, you might find Karen watching the markets, working in the field in Sierra Leone, or listening to young women in an orphanage in Panama.
Photograph © Matt Noble, used with permission
