This month we have been exploring the theme of pilgrimage – spiritual journeys with purpose. Today Jenny Flannagan reflects on Gideon and her own reckless choices.
I have it in me to be reckless and foolish. I cover it up quite well now I’m a grown-up, but I got in trouble at school for being impetuous, for pushing jokes too far and hurting people. Today this often translates into a restless desire to move too fast and take too many risks (regularly mitigated by Andy).
This week I was thinking about the end of school. When I was applying for universities, there was one I particularly set my heart on. Within that one university were a large number of colleges, and in order to get a place at the university I had to choose just one of the colleges to which I would apply. And so I prayed for direction from on high.
I felt led (in typically dramatic fashion) to apply to one particular college. The only problem with that was that out of all the colleges in that university (about 30), there were just two of them that required applicants to take an extra exam to get in. My teacher told me candidly that I wasn’t good enough to take the exam. And then I went and applied to one of those two colleges.
Was that a bold step of faith or just a foolish, reckless (and self-sabotaging) decision? Was I perhaps deluded (and a little arrogant)? My teacher (herself a Catholic) told me what a ridiculous thing I had done, and how absurd it was to imagine that God cared what college I applied to.
In the end, a couple of months down the line, the college rejected me, but recommended me to a different college who gave me a place at the university. So maybe there was an amazing divine purpose at work throughout the process. Or maybe God just opened a different door out of kindness. Or perhaps it was all a lucky coincidence. It’s impossible to know, but I was thinking about it again this week, and how one person’s leap of faith looks to someone else like an act of stupidity, and often there’s no way of knowing for sure which it really is.
The past two Sundays, possibly for the first time in my life, I have listened to two consecutive sermons (in different churches) about Gideon. If you don’t know the story, he led an army of Israelites into battle against the Midianites (as related in the Old Testament book of Judges), and they won. But before the battle God basically told Gideon to reduce the size of his army from about 22,000 to 300 (despite an enormous enemy army) so that they would know when they won that it was because of God’s work, not theirs. At one point the men all go down to the local water source to get a drink, and according to their water-sipping technique, most of them are sent home. It’s more than ridiculous.
Outside of a framework of religious faith, it is especially absurd.
But there have always been people who have based their decisions on more than they can see with their eyes. It’s not unusual to hear people talk about following their gut or their instinct when making a big decision, or even to have a ‘sixth sense’ about something. Even those of us who aren’t religious often feel like there is something else to tune into. And there are plenty people who claim to have been directed, in small and large ways, by an invisible spiritual force – God, in some sense.
I remember meeting a group of three girls in their 20s who had pioneered some amazing work in a dirt-poor favela (slum) in Brazil, having been told by anyone with any sense that the problems there were too big, too entrenched, that they were too vulnerable as young single women, too powerless. And yet they felt called to go, and they trusted in more than the realities they could see. (And in a nice epilogue, after witnessing what the girls were able to accomplish the local government had a change of heart and decided that maybe they could provide some basic services to the community after all).
Different friends of mine have, at various moments, turned their back on western life and moved to slums, favelas, townships, war zones…mostly because they have felt a calling from a source they couldn’t see, and have trusted in that voice over and above the claims of common sense, self-preservation, comfort and ease. I’m not saying that every decision that looks high-risk or reckless (or even every job undertaken in a warzone) is motivated by faith in a higher power. But there are a lot of people whose lives are shaped by more factors than can be reasonably defended. (And it’s not just the dangerous decisions – there are plenty that just seem counter-intuitive, indulgent, obsessive, perverse, pig-headed, ignorant and unwise).
When I look back at Gideon’s story, the striking thing is how high the stakes are. How certain must you have to be of God’s divine leading to put other lives at risk, and the potential future of your whole nation? When the risk is more than just personal, you must have to be pretty sure of what God has said. That’s when you want more than just a ‘gut-sense’ that something is the right thing. The reality when I think of my own life is that I am often just not sure. Not sure if I heard God, if that was really him, if my motives aren’t a bit mixed…and I’ll gamble different ways on different days.
When I was younger I was braver and bolder, and more sure that God guided me. But the consequences of my decisions were less far-reaching and could probably be mitigated by my family. As time has gone on, my experience and understanding of the world have become more complicated; I have been disappointed and hurt in ways I never imagined; my life has taken a shape I never predicted; I have become less certain of the terrain, or rather, less sure that my way of seeing things is really how things are. And I find myself wondering if I still have the courage to make foolish choices – now that they look less black and white, and that they affect more people.
It’s not that I think foolishness is something to be pursued for its own sake. But I think that a journey of faith inevitably leads, sometimes, to decisions that don’t make rational sense, that seem to fly in the face of received wisdom, that look reckless or wilful or ill-conceived. Because you’re seeking to make decisions within a framework that is beyond your own understanding, and beyond rational definition – a bigger picture that only God can see. And whilst I always want to guard against anything that hurts other people, and against self-destructive recklessness, I also aspire to the courage that will lead me sometimes to choices that look foolish and which might not make sense to you. I will make mistakes and look ridiculous, of course. But I hope I will also grow in faith and discernment, and see beautiful, surprising and miraculous things happen that I would otherwise have missed.