The Long Walk Home

The hardest part of trusting God isn't the first step. It's the long walk after, before we know the outcome. For instance, when I lived in Boston, I spent a year living in Dorchester, in a neighborhood where it wasn't safe to be outside after dark. I once asked one of my roommates why he'd moved there. He told me it was a "leap of faith." He believed God would provide for him, so he summoned the courage to move in and serve the community. It seemed foolish at the time. How can ministering to children in a small house church change anything? But sixteen years later, that crazy choice gave him opportunities to reform entire criminal justice systems in partnership with academics and politicians. We never know God's plans for our small steps of faith.

At one of the lowest points in my life, I'd been hurting for so long that I didn't know if the pain would ever go away. I'd sit in my office and look blankly at my computer monitor, with no idea what to do. Good friends would tell me their own stories of recovering from devastation, but I was too depressed to be encouraged. All I could do was politely remark, "I'm so glad that God did that for you" while thinking, "But God hasn't done that for me."

In the spring of 2009, a student I discipled, whom I'll call Rob, went on a missions trip to Honduras. Unfortunately, one of his housemates was hostile. Rob ignored the insults, washed the guy's dishes, and endured listening to his blaring techno music through the night. The final straw came when Rob borrowed his housemate's computer, and it stopped working while he was typing up an email. His housemate threatened to beat him up if he didn't pay $150 to get it fixed.

I once got incredibly angry at one of my roommates because he wrote a blog with what I considered bad theology. I felt I had to defend God, so I wrote him a long, impassioned email where I told him he was unbiblical, a burden to others, and even a bad example to children. Amazingly, he responded and rightly told me that my email was demoralizing and insulting. As I re-read what I wrote, the adrenaline of "being right" drained out of me, replaced by a cold pit in my stomach. I immediately confessed to him, "My email was a disaster... I am sorry." It was cruelty in the name of God.

I was on a global Skype call with RZIM's senior leaders and Ravi Zacharias himself—the famous apologist whose ministry would eventually collapse after reporters uncovered decades of abuse. I was looking at an email Ravi had sent to a woman: "If you betray me here, I will have to end it." For a man whose entire ministry testimony began with a suicide attempt, this should have been impossible to ignore. But the call was filled with friends and mentors I respected. They assured me Ravi was innocent, and that if I understood Indian culture, I'd see this differently. So I stayed loyal. It wasn't that I weighed the evidence and found it wanting. It's that I couldn't weigh the evidence at all. The room I was in made the truth unthinkable.