Safety, Risk, and Backwards Lies.

I thought I was taking a risk, heading off to Cambodia for three months. After spending my formative years in a third world country, I had gotten a little too comfortable with my suburban American life, and it was time to go. It was time to go far, to leave the cave and regain my sight.

So on August 30 in the middle of the night I set out down the long tunnel at Newark International Airport, away from family and friends and familiarity, and walked willfully, yet nervously, into the arms of the great unknown.

At the time it seemed like truly risky business.

But this was before I got there and realized that the time of preparation before the trip was ten times more stressful than actually being there, and before I was slapped in the face with the realization that the idea of safety as we know it is largely a figment of our imagination.

Within the first few weeks of my time in Cambodia, I heard from a friend of mine back home who was mugged by my next-door neighbors, the ones who’d always be hanging out on the front steps when I’d get home from work. Then came news of the tragic Amish school shooting, which made front page headlines in the Cambodian newspaper, along with a map of the area that showed the school just a few miles from my parents’ house.

So there I was in Cambodia (which is not necessarily synonymous with safety in the first place), hearing accounts of senseless violence from “home sweet home,� along with reports of a military coup in the country to the west and a typhoon just to the east.

And in a way, this was nothing new. I did, after all, grow up in Guatemala, where the fact that my first fifteen years were spent in a nation engaged in civil war seemed normal to me. And I did travel to Kenya in the summer of 2004, just days after the State Department issued a warning, urging Americans to stay out if they knew what was best for them.

If your instinct is to tell me that the kind of thing I am advocating is analogous to walking across an LA freeway with a blindfold over my eyes, I’d challenge you to reconsider. There is a big difference between the risk of venturing into parts of the world or parts of your city commonly (often ignorantly and wrongly) deemed unsafe, and the risk of jumping off cliffs into quarries when anyone can tell you this has been a recipe for all too many needless deaths.

While both kinds of activities are risks, one is senseless, and one is right. Both are risky because you never know what will happen. But stepping out of your comfort zone is something God calls all of us to, and it is right because it is sometimes only by venturing into the unknown that we can come back home with new eyes, able to see the often disturbing (but no less real) truth that we don’t have control over much of anything, no matter where we are. And when we go to these places, the idea that here is safe and there is risky will be exposed for the backwards lie that it is, along with the lie that we, and those like us, are mostly saints, while they, whoever they are, are mostly demons.

There may have been a time when it was less crucial to know anything about the outside world. But today the outside world has come inside, to the point that there is really no longer any inside and outside, but rather only side-by-side.

So, as people called to love our neighbors, we’d do well to get to know them. And you just can’t do that in a cave.