Just Courage - Haugen

I just finished reading a very challenging and helpful book. If you wonder about your part in battling injustice, read this book. If you wonder about how you might meet the needs of the least of these, read this book. If you wonder why your faith journey seems bland, irrelevant, and lacking adventure, read this book. It was written by Gary A. Haugen, who is the president and CEO of International Justice Mission (IJM), and is titled Just Courage: God’s Great Expedition for the Restless Christian.

Here are a few excerpts to get you interested:

. . . it is my sense that many Christians are starting to suspect that they are stuck at the visitor’s center. They suspect that they are traveling with Jesus but missing the adventure.

In different times and in different ways, our heavenly Father offers us a simple proposition: Follow me beyond what you can control, beyond where your strength and competencies taken you, and beyond what is affirmed or risked by the crowd – and you will experience me and my power and my wisdom and my love. (17)

Mother Teresa said that she couldn’t imagine doing her work for more than thirty minutes without prayer. Do you and I have work that we can’t imagine doing for thirty minutes without prayer?

If not, perhaps we need a new life’s work. (23)

God calls us to make the transition from being those who have been rescued from the world, to those through whom God is literally rescuing the world.

As C.S. Lewis has written in The Weight of Glory, "it’s not that we have too much ambition for ourselves; it’s that we don’t have nearly enough. . .

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

Given the grand and plain calling of Scripture to a bold, glorious struggle for rescue in the world, why do so many of us tend to miss the larger calling and settle for so little? (30-31)

If we answer God’s call to be the light of the world in the midst of great darkness and sign up to be the means by which Jesus is seeking to rescue the world – honestly, that simply feels intimidating. It sounds uncomfortable, scary, frustrating, exhausting and probably dangerous – and worst of all, it’s unknown and out of our control. This is not why we went to college, bought a nice house in a good neighborhood, put seat belts on our kids and locked our doors at night. I did these things to stay out of the darkness, not to move toward it. (34)

Certainly the work of justice brings marvelous rescue and joy to the victims of injustice, but God wants his people to know that the work of justice benefits the people who do it as well. It is a means of rescue not only for the powerless but also for the powerful who otherwise waste away in a world of triviality and fear. (41)

Take the cul-de-sac, for example, which is my metaphor for the world of suburban monotony and triviality that so many Western Christians find themselves trapped in. The literal cul-de-sac (i.e., a dead-end street), a feature of suburban housing developments, was designed to address homeowner anxieties about the dangers of automobile traffic in their streets. It was thought that the closed-off street would eliminate dangerous, high-speed traffic that might be especially threatening to children playing on the sidewalks and streets. Looking for a pathway to safety, human beings built cul-de-sacs. Ironically, several decades later, studies reveal that cul-de-sacs are the most dangerous residential configurations for children. It turns out that, contrary to our intuitions, children aren’t injured by forward-moving traffic nearly as much as by cars backing up – which is exactly what cars do in cul-de-sacs.

. . . Likewise many Christians and churches in the West, seeking safety from a dangerous world, a threatening culture and personal weakness have turned inward to the prosperous cul-de-sac, only to find a spiritual atrophy, mediocrity and boredom that is lethal to the soul. But thankfully, Jesus is beckoning us to a better way. . . It is the route to rescue from the very specific perils of fear and pettiness that threaten this present generation, and it is the path to life for hundreds of millions of people who are suffering in our world.

It is God’s call to

seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:17 NRSV)
(44-45)

The sin of injustice is defined in the Bible as the abuse of power – abusing power by taking from others the good things that God intended for them, namely their life, liberty, dignity, or the fruits of their love or their labor. (47)

. . . the weaker person is suffering because of the very intentional abuse and oppression of a stronger person. This is injustice – and God intends that the nature of this specific sin should be very clear to us. (48)

The poorest people in our world suffer from a lot of familiar problems. They suffer from hunger, homelessness, illiteracy and sickness. And in response, all over the world, people of goodwill bring to bear familiar forms of assistance: we bring food and shelter and education and medicine.

But at the root of much of this suffering is actually a different problem – a less familiar problem – namely, violence. Many times the widow’s children are hungry because bullies have stolen her land and she can no longer grow her own food. The street child is homeless because sexual abuse in the home has forced her onto the streets. The young boy is illiterate because he is held as a slave in a brick factory and can’t go to school. The teenage girl has AIDS because she has been forcibly infected with the disease while held captive in a brothel. (49)

Violence is just different. Violence is intentional. Violence is scary. And violence causes deep scars. (50)

The vast majority of violence oppressing the poor is not driven by the overwhelming power of the perpetrators – it’s driven by the utter vulnerability of the victims. Give the poor a strong, consistent advocate who won’t go away, and the oppressors will simply leave them alone. (54)

The struggle for justice is special because it is not only the most neglected category of global ministry of the last hundred years but it also requires the very thing we most yearn for in our era: courage. (60)

The first step for many of us . . . is to truly receive our rescue from Christ. To return to that place of grace where our worth – our rock solid worth – is affirmed fully and without condition by our Creator, our Maker, the Lover of our soul who died for us and fully redeemed us. If we have not found how profoundly God cares for us, we will not be equipped to care for the needy world that lies beyond us. (106)

It’s not by sheer will that we become brave. It takes reformation of the heart. God doesn’t call us to try to be brave but to train to be brave. (108)

Do we want to be brave or safe? Gently, lovingly, our heavenly Father wants us to know that we simply can’t be both. (113)

Over and over in Scripture Jesus teaches us that his disciples will suffer for following him. Of course, we will avoid a lot of suffering because we are following him (the suffering of guilt, of self-destruction, of addiction, of hell). But there are other kinds of suffering we will encounter precisely because we are following him – and he wants us to be very clear about this.

Clearly, some suffering is a part of God’s will. It isn’t necessarily the suffering itself that is God’s will, but rather following the will of God in a fallen world will generate suffering in our lives. There are two things that are always the will of God and almost always dangerous: telling the truth and loving needy people. (115)