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WORK TITLE: Dangerous Territory
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.amypeterson.net/
CITY:
STATE: IN
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.dcjacobson.com/amy-peterson/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; husband’s name Jack; children: Owen and Rosemary.
EDUCATION:Texas A&M, B.A.; Wheaton College, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
ESL teacher and author. Taylor University, Honors Program Assistant Director and teacher.
AVOCATIONS:Eco living, mystery fiction, napping, comedies, hiking, sitcoms, writing in the morning, dark chocolate, traveling internationally, popcorn, coffee.
WRITINGS
Contributor to blogs in periodicals, including Art House America, Christianity Today, and Christ and Pop Culture. Also contributor to periodicals, including She Loves Magazine, her.meneutics, Curator, Books & Culture, The Living Church, Comment Magazine, Red Letter Christians, Other Journal, River Teeth, Cresset, St. Katherine Review, Millions, and Relief.
SIDELIGHTS
Amy Peterson works primarily with Taylor University as an Honors assistant director and instructor, and a writer. In the past, she led English as a Second Language courses. Her writing has appeared within several different publications, both online and off.
Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World deals with another of Peterson’s past careers. As a younger adult, she spent some time conducting missionary work in foreign countries. Her faith continues to be a major part of her life, and is what drove her to pursue missionary work in the first place. The book serves as both a history of the missionary field and a memoir of Peterson’s time performing missionary work.
Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World starts during Peterson’s younger years, just before she is to embark upon her first missionary journey. Peterson initially hopes to view missionary work as her calling, and a way for her to use her skills to support a much greater cause. However, she has a few reservations from the start. She has heard both the glory tales and the warnings of what can go wrong. However, she also wants to help bring change. Her expectations tip completely over once she arrives in her assigned country, which is never identified but is described as resting in the Southeast Asian region. In addition to missionary work, she is also tasked with teaching the English language. One of her students takes to the idea of Christianity and makes the decision to convert, enraptured by the religion. However, once the student imparts her newfound religion to others, trouble swarms in. Peterson discovers Christians are a much unwelcomed minority, whose beliefs often earn legal punishment. Her student is arrested, and Peterson is banned from her ESL instruction job. Peterson is not allowed to express her faith, a notion that both shocks her and rattles her to her core. However, she tries to keep strong and make it through her missionary trip as best she can.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly expressed that Dangerous Territory “will appeal to any readers wanting to align themselves with God’s will, whether in a foreign land or at home.” Matthew Loftus, a reviewer on the Englewood Review of Books Website, remarked: “The evangelical world needs stories like Peterson’s — stories of people who were faithful and didn’t see dramatic fruit.” Christianity Today writer Rachel Pieh Jones commented: “[Peterson] nudges the conversation in the right direction with helpful wisdom and the spirit of a learner.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2016, review of Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World, p. 142.
ONLINE
Amy Peterson Website, http://www.amypeterson.net (October 17, 2017), author profile.
Christianity Today, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ (April 21, 2017), Rachel Pieh Jones, review of Dangerous Territory.
D.C. Jacobson & Associates, http://www.dcjacobson.com/ (October 17, 2017), author profile.
Englewood Review of Books, http://englewoodreview.org/ (May 11, 2017), Matthew Loftus, review of Dangerous Territory.
Making All Things New, https://chris-baker-c06i.squarespace.com/ (January 7, 2013), author profile.*
AMY PETERSON
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Amy Lepine Peterson is a writer, ESL instructor, and Assistant Director of Honors Programming at Taylor University. With more than ten years of experience teaching, she has worked with people from over a dozen countries and completed a master’s in Missions and Intercultural Studies from Wheaton College.
Amy writes regularly for Christ and Pop Culture, and has contributed to Christianity Today women’s blog, her.meneutics, as well as Books & Culture, Comment Magazine, The Other Journal, Red Letter Christians, The Living Church, The Curator, She Loves Magazine, and Art House America, among others. Amy's first book, Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World, was released by Discovery House Publishers in February 2017.
She currently resides on two acres of farmland in rural Indiana with her husband and two small children.
Website: amypeterson.net
Twitter: @amylpeterson
Instagram: @amypete
Facebook: facebook.com/amy.l.peterson.75
Things I Love, a Partial List
Long highway drives and places without highways. I want to go everywhere. (17 countries down, 179 to go.)
Jack, who won my heart with music. He introduced me to Joanna Newsom, sang European pop songs at karaoke, and wrote lyrics that made me yearn for both him and God. He also made Rosemary and Owen possible.
Those kids we made.
Those kids we made.
Rosemary and Owen.
The liturgy and Eucharist at the Episcopal church I attend. Also, the Presbyterian love for doctrine, the Baptist zeal for evangelism, the Pentecostal relationship with the Holy Spirit, the Catholic’s desert monks. In short, the ecumenical church. The kingdom of God.
Students, like those I work with at Taylor University, who are willing to learn how to communicate across cultural boundaries. My favorite students (oh, I have them) are willing to ask questions too big to answer simply (or at all).
The four chickens that a weasel murdered last week (R.I.P. Goldie, Nightmare, Callie, and Starbright.)
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Almost everything about living on two acres in the country.
Veronica Mars. And Rory Gilmore. Also Nancy Drew and Harriet Vane and Meg Murray. Intrepid women. Pop culture. Teen stuff.
Books, mostly all of them.
Food, mostly all of it.
You, for reading this.
Here's a link to answer to the question "Why do you blog?"
Thanks for reading.
email: coamyp at gmail dot com
Or maybe you were looking for something more like this:
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Amy Peterson teaches and works with the Honors program at Taylor University. With a B.A. in English Literature from Texas A&M and an M.A. in Intercultural Studies from Wheaton College, Amy taught ESL for two years in Southeast Asia before returning stateside to teach in California, Arkansas, and Washington. Amy has written for River Teeth, St. Katherine Review, Relief, Books & Culture, The Millions, Christianity Today, The Other Journal, The Cresset, and Art House America, among other places. Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World is her first book.
Amy enjoys cozy mysteries, screwball comedies, and classic sitcoms—80% dark chocolate, french-press coffee, and very buttery popcorn—international travel, early morning writing, and the idea of gardening—as well as hiking, napping, and experimenting in sustainable practices of living.
my (self-important) blogging manifesto
January 7, 2013
did i mention we spent thanksgiving in arkansas? we did.
So, here’s what I’ve decided about my blog: it’s personal, not professional (inasmuch as one can make that distinction in the digital age: what I mean is that I have no professional goals as a blogger, and that any professional goals I have as a writer are not, at the moment, directly connected to my blogging).
my heart.
I’ll continue to share the journal of my life here: occasional photos, recipes, lists of books and movies and tv shows, and my (mostly unedited, spur of the moment) thoughts. As my kids grow older, there will likely be less and less about them. I can share my stories, but their stories should be their own.
and christmas in georgia
I value the blog because it’s a place where I can write without having to conform to any editorial standard, without any assumed voice. It’s just me. And I value the blog because it’s a place for connections - for my connections with my real-life friends and family, and with my online friends. (Thank you.)
The blog is (thirdly) a place where I like to record some of my goals and the steps I take toward them, and to seek your help in that. I have one especial project to undertake in that regard, and I’ll write about it sometime next week.
A number of people have written eloquently at the start of this year about the whats and whys of blogging. Check out Andrew Sullivan, Megan at Sorta Crunchy, and perhaps especially David Sessions at Patrol:
To be a fresh and relevant writer means, I think, that you have to be something like a fresh and relevant person, one who reads slowly and widely, has idiosyncratic interests, goes new places, meets new people, and regularly changes their mind. Feeling my own perspective plundered and empty over the years has pushed me to appreciate the value of, if we use Nolan’s terms, “building up the principal.” I don’t know any universally applicable way to do this, especially if you work in the media. Graduate school has played that role for me: being forced to read difficult books I cared about but would never have worked through otherwise, pushed to make new connections and learn about worlds and historical events I barely knew existed. The more you can be forced past your current perspective, and not just by other bloggers and journalists, the better. The more you can participate in something besides consuming media and blogging, the better. The more you can really learn about something the better; good writing can’t survive all that long on nothing but voice and other people’s reporting.
I’m young, and not ready to be a prolific writer if it means plundering my own perspectives, leaving me emptied of ideas. I want to be sure I’m busier “building up the principal” - reading challenging books, meeting new people, trying new things - than I am reading blogs and writing blog posts. I want to be a person of wide-ranging interests, one with the ability to follow a sustained, long-form argument, one with as many moments of quiet as moments of digital noise.
So there it is. My new (self-important, narcissistic) blogging manifesto. What do you think?
Dangerous Territory
Publishers Weekly. 263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p142.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
* Dangerous Territory
Amy Peterson. Discovery House, $13.99 trade
paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-62707-597-8
Debut author Peterson recounts her trek to Southeast Asia to teach English and serve as a missionary, although she loathes the term because of the negative associations it carries. Like many who were raised in the Christian faith and have thought about overseas work, Peterson longed for God to do something big in her life, admiring the "glamorous" missionary stories of Amy Carmichael, George Muller, and Jim Elliot. Her memoir chronicles two years in a closed country where evangelism is forbidden (she can't even tell readers her exact placement for fear of putting others in danger) and shares how her faith unraveled when she was discovered as a Christian. Forced to come to terms with results she didn't want or expect, her understanding of God began to shift and grow in different ways as she experienced a spiritual reorientation. "Was 'making a difference' really something I was called to do?" she asks. "No verse in my New Testament asked me to make a difference." Interspersed throughout her memoir are "interludes" that discuss the background of missionary work and the consequences--good and bad--that stem from it, which adds a nice touch of critical analysis to her personal narrative. Peterson is a thoughtful writer whose honest prose will appeal to any readers wanting to align themselves with God's will, whether in a foreign land or at home. (Feb.)
Amy Peterson – Dangerous Territory [Feature Review]
May 11, 2017 — 0 Comments
43 161 0 207
The Napoleon Dynamite
of Missionary Biographies?
A Feature Review of
Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World
Amy Peterson
Paperback: Discovery House, 2017
Buy Now: [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]
Reviewed by Matthew Loftus
Amy Peterson’s debut book, Dangerous Territory, is not your typical missionary biography and it is not meant to be. As Peterson recounts her story of teaching English as a Second Language for two years in Southeast Asia, she deliberately tries to subvert the conventions of the missionary memoir in order to change the way we talk about missions. In an article last year for Christianity Today, she wrote that “We need to hear stories about the real struggles and joys of missions work.” This is one of those stories.
Peterson begins her story a few weeks before she leaves for the first time, frequently flashing back to moments when she felt called to overseas missions. The main narrative of her two-year term in Southeast Asia is broken up by “interludes” that feature more abstract reflections on four subjects: missionary narratives, short-term trips, the role of women on the mission field, and the missionary vocation itself. These interludes stand alone from the memoir, but the points she makes in them are constantly reinforced by her experiences.
For example, she feels torn between the passionate messages she hears at conferences about going all-in for Jesus like the missionary heroes of yesteryear and her natural discomfort in evangelizing non-Christians. She is no starry-eyed dreamer waiting for her naivete or pride to be crushed; she knows enough to know that she doesn’t want to be like the arrogant father from The Poisonwood Bible. She knows that she does not want to be a colonizer or a contemporary “expat” (the catchall term she uses in the book to describe rich foreigners who embrace a Western lifestyle). What, then, does she want?
Despite the book’s subtitle (“My Misguided Quest to Save the World”), Peterson’s story demonstrates that before she even got on a plane to Southeast Asia, she respected the limits of what she can accomplish. She decides explicitly at the outset that she will be a “neighbor.” This is in contrast not only to the stereotypical missionaries she has encountered in fiction or history but also to her own years spent indulging her wanderlust across Europe. She recognizes that the desire to jet in and out of places and relish a sense of adventure has helped drive her (and many others) to the mission field, but seems to acknowledge that this desire to find adventure won’t help– and may even hurt– her ability to stay for the long term and truly help the people she comes to care about.
After getting adjusted to her new life in Southeast Asia, though, Peterson starts to wonder about when she might get around to changing the world, one English student at a time. Her prayers are answered in the form of “Veronica,” a sweet and earnest first-year student whose interest in the Bible is mostly fueled by the professions of faith from American boy band members. This does not make her any less eager to study Scripture or start sharing it with her friends as soon as she comes to believe in its truth. Veronica is a post-Poisonwood missionary’s dream: through Peterson’s patient relationship-building and thoughtful questions, Veronica becomes a Christian and starts trying to live out her faith with nary a harsh sermon or pushy altar call.
Once Veronica’s faith gets going, the story starts to become more interesting. The bold new convert, at the author’s encouragement, begins to tell her friends about Jesus and connect with other Christians around. Peterson leaves for a scheduled vacation home excited about what sort of flourishing little church she might encounter when she returns. Unfortunately, her protege’s zeal quickly invites the attention of the police, who arrest and interrogate Veronica and the other girls studying the Bible together. Veronica remains committed to the faith, despite this pressure, but Peterson is accused of being a spy and forbidden to return to teaching at the university.
The author reflects on all the possible decisions that could have led to this point: being too bold in inviting new people to study, connecting Veronica with another Christian already under police surveillance, leaving Christian literature and a JESUS Film for her young disciples to learn from. Nothing was particularly damning or even unexpected for someone in their first year abroad learning how to navigate the difficult cultural and social barriers that she encountered. Again, there was no grand hubris that put the author’s friends in danger– just a few careless decisions and mistaken judgments.
Peterson has to quickly decide between moving to a new country or staying home. She elects to join another team in Cambodia, where her story begins to meander as it mostly focuses on renewing her relationship with God after the hurts she experienced during her first year and falling in love with her husband, a fellow missionary. The narrative arc is far more like Napoleon Dynamite than The End of the Spear, reaching a happy conclusion without heightening the drama in the third act. Again, this seems an intentional decision to subvert the traditional missionary memoir, as the author herself seems to learn more about God’s grace than any of the students she’s trying to work with.
In fact, during her term in Cambodia, Peterson and her fellow missionaries are more free to openly evangelize– but this doesn’t make the work any less difficult. She finds herself more dissatisfied with the prevailing approaches to missions (which she traces back to “major commercial enterprises” of the 1800s). Just as she found the traditional narratives of missionaries-as-heroes counterproductive to genuine spiritual formation, she takes issue with the contemporary business-oriented approach to missions, asking:
What if we had more bi-vocational missionaries? What if our boards were more diverse, and staffed by people who understand the local situation on the ground rather than by church leaders thousands of miles away? What if peripheral theological debates didn’t have to divide us? What if we functioned as a spiritual body rather than as a financial corporation? What if we could cut costs by creating more local partnerships? What if we could empower those on the margins to be missionaries by creating lighter, more flexible structures?
The good news is that these very things she is asking for are happening all over the world — but, unfortunately, she doesn’t explore how these experiments in “other ways of doing missions” are going. Most of the interludes are similar, with little space given to any arguments for the traditional models she critiques and only fleeting references given to contemporary alternatives that are living out her suggestions. Many (if not most) churches still need to take the above questions seriously and deal with the historical baggage that has accumulated over two-and-half centuries of missions movements. But Dangerous Territory seems to elide the fact many missionaries and sending organizations have been wrestling with these issues for years, leaving the discussions about these topics fragmented and incomplete.
The discussion about the vocation of missionaries near the end of the book feels particularly constrained by its brevity. In both that interlude and the book’s conclusion, Peterson discusses how all callings and vocations are equally valuable– but in trying to make this point, she neglects the fact that not all vocations are equally costly. The world surely needs good janitors as much as it needs good doctors, but training a physician requires far more time and money. Similarly, all Christians are indeed called to be faithful neighbors wherever we are– but being a faithful cross-cultural missionary requires a greater deal of commitment to reckon with the costs such a life entails.
I don’t want to perpetuate the false dichotomy that Peterson argues about between the “holy” and the “ordinary”, nor do I think it’s healthy for anyone who isn’t a missionary to think of themselves as a “second-class Christian.” I am sure that Peterson would agree with me that encouraging all Christians to live at a level of discipline and joy that missionaries require to sustain their lives in difficult field . Until that happens, though, the stark realities of the mission field will select for those who have counted the cost and reject those who have not cultivated the necessary disciplines and joys. A love for adventure, a desire to prove oneself, and an urge to save the world are terrible foundations for any career– but they are often necessary to catalyze the first big move overseas or the start of a new ministry. A great deal of missionary life does consist of the exact same boring spiritual disciplines that our churches back home are trying to encourage and form. However, those disciplines are lived out in a context where the missionary is often at greater physical risk and is required to spend more time and energy overcoming barriers to the Gospel or fighting back evil as it is manifested in disease, poverty, or violence. These risks and costs are unique, and they deserve appropriate recognition as long as they exist.
Peterson could have explored all these themes in relation to her story, the other missionaries she worked with, or the missionaries (historical and contemporary) we meet in other memoirs. Just a few more paragraphs wrestling with the story of Helen Roseveare, whose entire career and work dealt with so many of the issues that the author finds unresolved, would have added much. As it is, the book’s treatment feels halfhearted.
The evangelical world needs stories like Peterson’s — stories of people who were faithful and didn’t see dramatic fruit. Stories like these do illuminate contemporary debates about missiology and missions practices, but Dangerous Territory leaves out so much that the reader doesn’t get a sense of how diverse the contemporary mission field really is. The good news is that the author’s thesis is true — but Dangerous Territory limits its punch by only asking questions instead of exploring the answers being lived out all across the world.
————
Matthew Loftus teaches and practices family medicine in East Africa and Baltimore. You can learn more about his work and writing at MatthewAndMaggie.org
The Most Dangerous Thing About Being a Missionary in a Hostile Country
It all depends on how you understand ‘safety.’
RACHEL PIEH JONES| APRIL 21, 2017
Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World
OUR RATING
4½ Stars - Excellent
BOOK TITLE
Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World
AUTHOR
Amy Peterson
PUBLISHER
Discovery House
RELEASE DATE
February 1, 2017
PAGES
224
PRICE
$8.49
Buy Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World from Amazon
The obvious meaning of the title of Amy Peterson’s memoir, Dangerous Territory, is that she lived in a country where being a Christian was dangerous. Owning a Bible, watching the Jesus film, talking to friends and family about Jesus, going to religious conferences—all of it was dangerous. So dangerous in fact, that Peterson won’t mention the name of the country (which is somewhere in Southeast Asia).
But the under-the-surface meaning is that faith is dangerous, that following God is dangerous. Perhaps, even, that God himself is dangerous. Like Mr. Beaver said about Aslan in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, “Safe?...Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn't safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
This God—the good, unsafe God—is not the kind of God American Christians talk about often in their churches. But when Amy went abroad, she encountered him with the force of a head-on collision.
Experiencing a Dangerous God
It’s easy to hear Mr. Beaver’s words about Aslan, apply them to God, and quote them as true. Tingles run up and down my arms when I hear the sentence, and I’m inclined to worship this great, complex God. But being inspired and praising a dangerous God is a lot easier than experiencing him, or watching people we love experience him.
I have spent the last 14 years in three different countries in the Horn of Africa. One of the most common questions I get is: Are you safe? This is a hard question to answer. Do I feel safe? Yes. Am I actually, truly, really safe? Well…Yes. No. What do you mean by “safe?”
Do you mean, “Are there bombs going off and guns everywhere and high risk of kidnapping and I can’t leave my house or go out alone?” In that case, I am perfectly safe. But could I get malaria? Could my kids get dengue fever? Could there could be a car accident or a terror attack? Could I die or lose my faith? If you look at things that way, I am absolutely not safe.
Peterson was raised on a steady diet of missionary biographies, all the classics: Amy Carmichael, William Carey, Hudson Taylor, Adoniram Judson. She marinated in what she now calls the “missionary myth,” the notion that the best way to be a Christian, the best way to be a world traveler, and the best way for women to be active in ministry is to be a missionary. Because she loved Jesus and wanted to serve people in his name, she decided to train as an English teacher in order to work abroad.
Contrary to what her director communicated before she left the United States, Peterson found spiritually open, hungry people at the university where she taught English. She spent months investing in one young woman in particular, who then shared the gospel with her family, extended relatives, and close friends. Peterson writes their story as one of the delight and joy of discovery; this woman’s discovery of a loving God and Peterson’s discovery of this same God through fresh eyes.
Peterson was a little naïve in her first year abroad. There is nothing wrong with this; every expatriate—missionary, diplomat, soldier, businessperson, humanitarian—needs time to adjust. (I’m probably still at least a little naïve, even after 14 years.)
This comes across when she writes about not “being an expatriate but being a neighbor.” While the sentiment is sweet and understandable, the reality is that you are an expatriate and always will be, even as you try to live as a neighbor. She also writes about trying to adapt by eating local foods, wearing local clothing, and learning the local language. These are important steps, but they are merely the first and most obvious.
Living like a local means much more than eating rice with your right hand or taking a certain mode of transportation. There are deep-rooted traditions of politics, gender roles, religious convictions, moral standards, and interpersonal relationships to consider. I suspect this lack of appreciation of deep, foundational cultural differences may have contributed to some of Peterson’s shock and dismay when her efforts at evangelism led to persecution. Because she thought she had adapted, she was unprepared for the brutal response of those in authority who didn’t appreciate her message.
Asking Questions
When Peterson left for her summer break, the government began a severe crackdown. Real, intense persecution began, targeting her friend and the network of people with whom she had shared her new faith. Peterson’s work permit was revoked. She was personally devastated and worried for her friend.
She returned to Southeast Asia—to a more open country, Cambodia. But the previous year and the year in Cambodia would leave her with profound questions she couldn’t shake, and here is where Peterson’s story really came to life for me.
She asked questions about God, about his purpose and character: Where is God when his people suffer? Where is God when dreams we thought he gave us are crushed? How do we follow God when we thought we were, and the door is slammed shut? Who is God, and how do we find him in darkness, loss, and grief?
She also began asking questions about the missionary endeavor: Why does the current model sometimes make you feel like you’re running your own business? Why do terms like “short-term missions” persist? Can God’s kingdom spread without missionaries, as the work is most commonly understood today? What is the role of women in the global church? What role does race play in missions?
These are all the right questions—and if Peterson, after two years abroad, claimed to have answers for them, I probably would have thrown her book against the wall. I had been half-expecting another nauseating white-savior-complex story with a bit of apologetic self-redemption near the end and some faux-authoritative declarations on how to solve all these complex issues. But to my relief, Peterson does actual research, rather than relying solely on her brief experiences, and she presents suggestions more than answers. She nudges the conversation in the right direction with helpful wisdom and the spirit of a learner.
Her suggestions are provocative. She wonders, for example, whether the church should chuck the word “missionary” altogether and focus on vocation: on the holiness of ordinary work, from changing diapers to teaching English, and on the calling of all believers to speak of Jesus, to be his ambassadors, and to live as fragrant offerings in the world.
She also suggests a re-conceiving of short-term mission trips, an idea I find quite promising. Ideally, we could move away from promoting the naïve notion that a group of high schoolers with no construction experience could build a church better than a community’s able-bodied men—or that their knowledge of attachment disorders among orphans matches that of its unemployed women. Instead, a teenager could say, in Peterson’s words, “If you would like to invest in me, would you help me travel to a different culture so that I can expand my view of who God is and how he works by learning about him in a foreign land?”
No Safer Choice
Whether we are in physically dangerous territory or the spiritually dangerous territory of faith, we will be challenged, stretched, and changed. Because yes, God is not a safe God. But he made the fish spit Jonah out before the digestive juices could finish him off. He spared the Israelites from the deadly plagues that swept over Egypt. And, through Christ, he provided a way for his people to be clothed in the righteousness he demands.
Like Peterson discovered in Southeast Asia, we are never safe when we choose to follow God. But at the same time, there really is no safer choice.
The thing is, I still believe Christians can change the world. I believe we must—with humility, with sacrifice, with love that translates into action, focused on individuals, serving one person at a time. We must follow this dangerous God into dangerous territory, into places of risk, places at the margins.
No, God is not safe. But, as Peterson has so beautifully chronicled, he is—and will prove himself ever to be—good.
Rachel Pieh Jones lives with her family in Djibouti. She blogs at Djibouti Jones.