Recklessness and The Barbarian Way

Am I running away from myself? That’s the question I started to ask when I finished The Barbarian Way, a short read from Erwin McManus. I have read a couple of other books by the founder of Mosaic Church, and I picked this one up somewhere along the way. It’s been sitting on my shelf, and I finally decided to check it out during our Christmas break.

The holiday break was sixteen days, and now, the day after Christmas, I’m down to ten. I know this because I’ve been marking time. I set aside the break to ask questions of God, to search for His truth after a particularly hard season. A hard year. Sixteen days. Just over two weeks. Amid holiday festivities and traditions, I asked myself… Is two weeks enough time to hear, to understand, to make a change? Because my heart is ready for change. I want peace. A deep and abiding peace that transcends fear and the specter of loss. I want purpose. A clear and present purpose that brings order to my steps and infuses my days with hope and joy.

And so, as most divine interventions are, The Barbarian Way seemed to come at an appointed time.

In just 141 pages, McManus makes the case for a life lived in radical faith, in radical allegiance to a Jesus who defies the staid and sanitized religious life. His words are a clarion for a relentless love paired with sacrifice that is prepared to invade dark corners in spite of uncertainty. They are a call to embrace risk and courage. And I guess my heart needed to hear the cry.

As I put the book down, I realized I have been looking for safety — safety where I’ll never find it. For the first time in my life, perhaps satisfied with safety.

I don’t know if safety is an admirable pursuit. For certain, it is an understandable pursuit, particularly when you’ve encountered seasons of trauma. When places that should be safe, places you trusted to be safe, are not, the brain learns things. It becomes wired to anticipate crisis, to anticipate hardship and loss. To expect them and constantly be in a state of preparation to deal with them. Self protection becomes the default — a way of thinking that was foreign to me until it wasn’t.

I kind of remember the moment when I consciously shifted to self protection. It was a moment — or the culmination of many moments when I finally decided I had to choose myself over another. Choose to protect myself and my health and my safety at the expense of another. At the expense of someone I loved. Now, more than a decade later, I see that moment as the trap door that closed my heart. It partitioned my emotions so that I could accept the life and death consequences of a decision. It not only closed my heart to one person, but almost every person — including myself. I lost touch with myself and with the me that I was always familiar with. I lost confidence that I could know myself or even hear God.

In that process, protecting myself and my heart became a habit, a little understood priority that I didn’t even consciously realize was happening. Yes, I learned empathy — through a deep connection with my own trauma and loss. I think I learned to see people more clearly, to listen for their truths, even to identify with their stories. I learned, but from a safe and guarded distance I barely even recognized.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen God begin to crack open my heart again, to breathe life into a purpose beyond the trauma and experience of loss. But, through that process, I found myself engulfed with fear. Almost frozen with fear. A fear rooted in self protection that seemed to separate me from things and people I most wanted to connect with.

The end of The Barbarian Way imparted an admonition that made me catch my breath.

“Do not dishonor Him by claiming that a life of faith is a life without risk.”

With the “Him” being Jesus, that statement was an indictment of my heart. I have a life of faith. I have always lived as an outlier in that tradition, willing to step outside the lines of organized religiosity to embrace the types of people and situations I felt Jesus embraced. I’ve lived with the notion that there is nothing God cannot use. I’ve committed myself from a very young age to try to follow the authentic Jesus in as much honesty as possible — even in the face of uncomfortable truths. After all, an untested faith or unquestioned faith is a weak faith. 

Enter safety. And grappling with the head space and heart space I accidentally learned.

Don’t get me wrong. The right kind of safety is necessary. Friendships and relationships that offer a safe and honest place for authenticity, conflict and redemption are true and often rare gifts. But, I have found myself in a pursuit of staying safe and unharmed that has made me question even the most obviously safe places and people. A pursuit of staying safe and insulated from loss or the risk of loss has also insulated me from my own purpose and my own heart’s truest desires.

As I began to think through and process some of McManus’ writing, I returned to the question… Am I running away from myself? In a search for safety and the absence of loss, am I really running away from who I am and who I want to be? To give yourself in service to someone else, to love with sacrifice as Jesus did is never safe. There is no love, no act of service, no courage without risk. Even hope is an act of courage. A willingness to open our hearts to others, to devote ourselves to knowing them with unflinching presence is to be willing to risk, to accept the inherent danger in knowing and being known.

I don’t know any more about my purpose for this season. With ten days more of holiday break, I’m still looking to God to share his truth. But, for sure, I know that the pursuit of love and service are indelibly entwined with that purpose. And a safer, less radicalized faith cannot co-exist effectively with those pursuits.

McManus called it an untamed faith, shepherding an untamed love for people, the goal of which is to impart God’s freedom relentlessly to even the most unlikely of people. “The driving purpose of this barbarian revolt,” he called it, “is to liberate every person who longs to find freedom in God.” And, he describes the “revolt” as an onslaught battle for light in our world, a battle that is impeded by safety and safe encounters. After all, even the glimmer of hope in this world requires courage.

The Barbarian Way challenged me to allow space for the dangerous, for courageous hope, for a reckless love patterned after Christ himself.