I had an interesting little conversation with my mom the other day about the four captive members of the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq being held hostage. She initially took a kind of Rush Limbaugh tack on the whole situation, saying, “Well, that’s what you get for putting yourself in dangerous situations like that. Maybe now they’ll learn what the world is really like.” I replied that contrary to popular belief, they were much, much more aware of the dangers of Iraq than you or I could ever be, considering that they had been living among the Iraqi people, outside the Green Zone, for quite a while.

On another front, this morning I also heard news of Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss, two college-aged volunteers with General Assembly moderator Rick Ufford-Chase’s No More Deaths in Arizona. They are going to stand trial January 10 for attempting to medically evacuate sick migrants out of a desert where nearly 300 people have died this year. If convicted of transporting illegal aliens and conspiracy to do so, they could spend 15 years in a federal prison. All for providing humanitarian aid.

It sounds silly now, but as a child my great fear was of martyrdom. Yeah, that’s how much the Pentecostals screwed me up with the whole dispensationalist end-times theology. I was convinced that during the Tribulation preceding the final Apocalypse, I would suffer horrible agonies, be tortured for my faith… I was eight years old at the time. Most little kids don’t want to suffer like that, for their faith or otherwise.

Then again, most adults don’t care to suffer either. And perhaps this is the paradox that both draws me to and repels me from the CPT story and from the No More Deaths case. Regardless of what you think about the causes these people support or their particular methodology, these are women and men who believed enough to put their very lives on the line. Both these Christian groups risked ostracization from the world for their beliefs in peace and justice, and now one group is facing the ultimate sacrifice for its stance. I admire that kind of faith in God, the losing of one’s life to gain it.

And yet how many of us are honestly ready to give so much? Indeed, I find myself wondering a lot about the call to sacrifice lately. Because the Christian life is certainly one in which we are all called to give ourselves up to gain our souls, to put all that we are on the line when God asks it of us. Being threatened with death is a rare circumstance for us as Americans, but God’s call almost always involves rejection from the world around us. Regardless of the trendiness of “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets a few years back, the heart of Jesus’ message has almost never enjoyed widespread popularity. It is a scary prospect, this following God.

So in this time of Advent, what is God calling us to do? How does God call you to live out your faith, to give up the old so that you can experience the new?

I don’t have the answer in my own life, to tell you the truth. But in reality, maybe the question itself is the answer. Because in the process of always searching, always asking where God is calling us, we are open to the movement of the Spirit in our lives. And when we find ourselves on the line, it is with the confidence and the knowledge that God is with us.

“If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let God deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up.” --Daniel 3:17-18

Kelsey