Risky Business: On Being with Jesus

As an overly cautious 10-year-old, God gave me the gift of an audacious best friend two years my elder, David. And never in the history of uneven best friendships has there been a greater distance between the naïveté of one friend and the boldness of the other. David could sure spin a tale. And I ate it up.

One day, in the woods beyond our dead-end street, we discovered a swarm of maggots. David explained to my younger brother and me that if we didn’t exter-minate these unseemly creatures, our homes would be at risk of infestation. That frightful concern was enough to spring us into action: the “maggot busters” were born. Armed with gasoline and torches made of sticks and old t-shirts, we quickly mitigated the risk.
Unfortunately, we had some leftover gasoline and the abandoned cooler from which the maggots emerged. We decided to see what additional magic would occur if we filled the bottom of the cooler with gas and set it aflame. Turns out a giant, fireball BOOM accompanies such a concoction!

As a bonfire raged, nearby trees began to catch on fire. A few glasses of water from our kitchen weren’t enough to tame the flame. Thankfully our hero, never to be outdone by two twerps, saved the day as he drug his backyard hose just close enough to the fire to put it out.

Looking back, I learned a valuable lesson that day: Who you are with often determines how courageous you will be.

What is your appetite for risk? Diff-erent people have different tolerances. Some thrill seekers jockey for it, others avoid it at all costs. As I’ve followed Jesus over the years, there is an important, but pesky follow-up question: should my relationship with Jesus affect my answer?

Almost 40 years on from my risk tolerance high-water mark, I am still quite naturally risk averse. But as I listen to the Saints and to the Scriptures, they remind me of the same lesson I learned long ago. Who you are with should determine how courageous you will be.

“Jesus is with me. I have nothing to fear,” says St. Pier Giorgio Frassati. He echoes Psalm 60:12: “with God, we shall do bravely.” But as I look around, sometimes it seems like the opposite is true, that the more someone embraces Christianity as a lifestyle, the more likely they are to avoid risk—particularly the risks embodied in the love and service of others.

In 1836, before he converted to Catholicism, St. John Henry Newman preached a sermon entitled, “Ventures of Faith,” where he proposes that, like the first followers of Jesus, “our duty as Christians lies in this, in making ventures for eternal life without the absolute certainty of success.” Faith should be a constant risk of putting more confidence in God than in our ability to ensure a ‘good’ outcome, of letting go of control and allowing sacrificial love to lead the way.

In 2018, I experienced this firsthand. I created a YouTube video asking whether or not the Pro-Life movement was actually ready for a post-Roe v. Wade world, part-icularly in terms of stepping up as foster and adoptive parents. I hesitated to release it. I knew it might be misunderstood. I knew it would likely draw criticism from every political side. But one question wouldn’t leave me alone: What would I do if I was fearless and full of faith—a question inspired by sermons like the one from St. John Henry Newman?

The answer became clear: I needed to share the message despite my hesitation.

That decision not only impacted others—many people around the country, in fact, decided to become foster and adoptive parents after watching the video. But, more importantly, this risk of faith changed me. My wife and I realized we couldn’t invite others into sacrificial love without stepping into it ourselves, again, even after we had long ago “done our part” in adopting four boys through foster care. Since then, dozens of children, teens, and parents in crisis have lived in our home—sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years. It has been the greatest gift and one of the riskiest challenges of our lives. We’ve seen poverty up way too close, and mercy even closer. We’ve seen tragic overdoses and Catholic baptisms, jail cells and first time home purchases, graduations, engagements, emergency rooms, police cars and newborns, death and life and everything breathtaking and beautiful in between.

All on the other side of comfortable.

If I could go one step further, I would posit that God’s will for your life, too, will involve risk because God’s will for your life always involves faith. Faith means stepping beyond what we can see and control, even into dangerous and reckless places like the unsafe space of cross and tomb. Fear can disguise itself as prudence. And our talents, while important, only take us so far. At some point, God will lead us beyond our human abilities into a place where we must rely entirely on Him. That’s where the real adventure begins.

So the question remains: What would you do—today, tomorrow, this year—if you were fearless and full of faith?

The answer to that question may very well be the doorway into the new life God has always dreamed of for you.+