Do It Scared

01Four metrics

Michael worked at Starbucks for two months — until Leslie rescued him — and what struck him was how a company that hires every kind of person, old and young, progressive and Christian, turns them into good leaders using only four measurements: time at the drive-through speaker, time at the window, drinks wasted, revenue. They hold people accountable to whatever gets in the way of those four, and it works its way into every corner of your life. Four simple things at the center that spider-web out into everything. Faith is like that. It gets us what we don’t yet have. It proves what’s already in us. It draws us toward God and away from the world. It changes our character. You cannot have what you haven’t had unless you access it through faith — which is why we talk about it so much.

Two days earlier he’d been at a men’s conference on Broadway in Nashville, and at the end they said: as men of God, let’s go evangelize. He immediately became hyper-aware of how he thinks evangelism should be done — and realized the real reason was that he was terrified. A thousand men at the conference; maybe a hundred left in the room after the invitation. Raise your hand if you’re scared. He was scared to raise his hand. Talking it through with a missionary friend that weekend, he admitted it plainly: Michael Pope walks around with a Lowe’s five-gallon bucket of insecurities. For years he tried to perfect them away. What he’s realized is that he’s living on the edge of what’s possible in his life — most of it requires faith — and the old buckets have emptied only to be replaced by new ones. They don’t matter much, as long as God is leading rather than them. He is the strong one, the capable one, the gracious one. We just surrender our will to that, in faith.

Live by legitimate faith — and do it scared. There is no faith without some doubt. Doubt isn’t the absence of faith. Not doing the thing you believe you ought to do is.

02Why faith pleases God

“And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”

Hebrews 11:6

Most of us have been insecure about how much faith we have — though usually we don’t think about it at all, because we live lives that require none. It’s the moment we’re sent to Broadway that we suddenly discover what our faith is in. But Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed moves a mountain — so does the faith move the mountain, or does God? The size of your faith is relatively irrelevant. What matters is the strength of the one moving the mountain, and enough faith to get yourself aligned with him. It isn’t the amount of your faith. It’s where your faith is placed. We are always having faith in something. On Broadway, Michael had plenty of faith — that if he went, he’d be embarrassed and rejected.

So why does faith please God? The verse says it: you believe he exists — not as a fact, but that he’s actually present for you — and that he rewards those who seek him, meaning something good comes from seeking him. If a friend asks Michael to coffee, it ministers to him: you think my presence is worth your time, and that something good will come from it. God isn’t an insecure God who needs you to confirm he exists. But when you act like he’s present and worth seeking, it still ministers to his heart.

03Faith makes you vulnerable on purpose

Faith by its very design makes you vulnerable, because you’re placing the fulfillment in something you don’t control. If it were in your control, it wouldn’t be faith. Hebrews 11:1 — the confidence in what we hope for, the assurance of what we don’t see. Faith is how we take what we hope is, but is not yet, and go get it. That’s scary because it’s out of our hands. And notice: what we want most and what could break our hearts start from the exact same place. People with little hope usually live with little faith, because hope is what puts the demands on your faith — what you want but don’t have determines how you have to live to get it.

And yet it’s essential, because it’s only in that vulnerable space that we find out we aren’t alone. Someone we trusted comes through. God provides. How would you ever know somebody was there for you if they never had to be?

Michael asked Will to face forward, look only at him, and fall back without turning around. Will stepped back and caught himself on a chair instead — and Michael said, fairly, that he would have done exactly the same. But you could see the disappointment on Will’s face, because we could have had something. If he’d fallen and been caught, trust would have grown; affection too; the next time would have been different. And if he’d turned and looked first, there’d have been no faith, no real trust, and nothing shared. That’s how relationship is built: out on a limb, met and caught, extending trust and not being let down. Without it, every action leaves you with nothing but objects in your life.

“Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed… Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead… Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.”

Romans 4:18–21

Read it closely: he did not waver through unbelief. Not without doubt — through it. He did it scared. Michael and Lex have had two miscarriages. When you want a baby and the baby dies and you get pregnant again, it isn’t all joy; it’s fear too, because you’re vulnerable and you don’t want a broken heart. But they have Penny, which is far more alive than no Penny. And the miscarriage after Penny did not feel the way the first one did — because they were not the same people with God. They had trust-fallen, even if God had to trap them into it, and they shared something with him now that they couldn’t have had otherwise. We come alive and fall in love through faith, and faith alone. Abraham gave glory to God not with a slogan but by letting God be who he was asking him to let him be: the giver of sons in a dead womb. There will always be a gap of control and knowing in faith. That gap is what does the magic.

04The boat

Michael has been baptized four times, but if his eternity changed at a moment, it was a different baptism. His first men’s retreat: 120 men, 150 acres, January, snowing, no showers. Maybe twenty percent were the hairy-chested, double-barrel-shotgun type; the rest felt the way he felt before Broadway, suddenly building a theology of manhood out of their fear. It’s true you don’t have to grunt to be a man of God. But Michael also knew that if there were a fight, he wasn’t sure he’d jump in — and God knew it too.

Then some men decided to float a flat-bottomed boat down a river the width of Brainerd Road, high and running fast, in the snow. Mike, grab the boat. Bad math — but he was too scared to say so. No boat ramp. No paddles; two sticks that didn’t reach the bottom. Two bullet holes in the hull, because somebody had shot it. They pushed off — better paddle fast — and his only job was to plug the holes with hands that went completely numb. He was furious, silent, calculating survival while they laughed. They swamped, dumped the boat on a rock, and jumped back in. Then a rebar bridge some old man had built came at them with the water too high to be sure they’d fit. Better lay back. They lay flat on each other and prayed as the rebar slid inches over their faces — and halfway under the bridge Michael thought, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever done. They came up, hit a tree nobody had calculated, and went into the water.

He came up a different man. Holy peer pressure — borrowing, for one afternoon, the faith other men had for things that were actually worth it. He came out thinking I’ve been doing Christianity wrong. He died that day to living like an animal calculating its survival, and started living by faith in the Son of God. He traded comfort for experience and security for comrades, and decided that Jesus, not someone else, would define his courage for his son and daughter. He didn’t have more faith afterward — something shifted, and he was just more afraid of losing different things. The process of faith was going to be worth it whether he got the thing or not, because of who he’d become and what he’d share along the way. And he started doing things with bad math that produced a whole lot of fruit.

You cannot understand your way into believing. You have to believe your way into true understanding.

The hot take: if someone has what you want, their peer pressure should matter more than your opinion. How does the one who has never succeeded become his own sensei? If the student sets the curriculum, how does he ever get what he’s never had?

05The response

After enough years in church, even passionate Christians get more interested in the rhythm than the altar. Michael wants to be someone less concerned with seeming like and more concerned with actually being. Imago exists to be people who refuse to let these words be for someone else — always becoming, not seeming. Fio, on the logo, means becoming. That takes vulnerability put into our faith every week, happy to repent because repentance is the beginning of relief. So we gave the Holy Spirit a few minutes, each with a hand on someone’s shoulder, to bring one thing to the surface, and then told that person what it was.

Courage, Churchill said, is the first virtue, because without it you can’t practice any other. And courage, by definition, is doing it scared.

Holy Spirit, bring to our hearts the thing you have next for us, small or big. Let us feel your grace — that the invitation has a smiley face in the bottom right corner. Let us feel the exchange of what’s worth losing and what isn’t, so we can see the value of the process even if we never get the thing. Amen.

An echo of Sunday’s closing prayer