√ Medellín is a big, Majority-World city. Levels of crime are higher than they are in the leafy suburbs of Indianapolis, a place that we’ve loved calling home. One continuously updated source ranks Medellín as a little safer than Spokane, Paris, and Tucson; and a little less safe than San Antonio, Winnipeg, and San Francisco.

√ Colombia is attempting to close the curtain on a fifty-year civil war. Active conflict of significant scope and scale is over. Yet civil war always drag a tail of dysfunction and violence by those who have been demobilized with no reliable future ahead of them.

√ The seminary’s campus is a paradise within a walled compound. Yet the neighborhood outside is a tough one and rather poor. Many of those neighbors have a soft spot for the seminary as a good local citizen. This sentiment mingles with the kinds of low-level threats that are common to such marginalized communities.

√ Local knowledge is everything. Portions of Medellín are as safe as it gets. There are other areas where you don’t wander.

Yet all this is circumstantial. Things in Colombia and Medellín are on an improving arc. They’ll probably get better. They may get worse.

Mostly, safety and peril lie on a different axis than this. Let me see whether we can explain:

Karen and I have no stomach for unnecessary risk. But our true security rests with God, who has placed a call on our lives and is entirely reliable. Our times are in his hands.

Our decision to serve in Medellín has the characteristics of a calling. It remains a decision, and we could have made a different one. Yet the direction of our lives leads so organically to service in Medellín that to opt for something else would be to swim against the current of God’s own guidance.

Our times are in his hands.

A truism sometimes heard on the lips of Christians is that ‘there is no safer place than right in the center of God’s will.’ Truisms grate on my ears, but they are truisms for a reason: they communicate something that is real.

There is work for us to do in Colombia that is, in our estimation, an opportunity like no other. God has knit our hearts together with the hearts of our future colleagues there. The opportunity to leverage a lifetime of preparation and experience is a door swung wide open. There are emerging Christian leaders there whom we can help to shape and encourage and make strong. Their lives will bear fruit for a generation or more.

We move towards Medellín with a growing love for Colombia’s people. We are aware of the risks. We are confident that we do not go alone.

If words like these do not still your worries, then please pray for us. Pray that we will be safe. But pray more, please, that we will bear the love and grace of Jesus to a continent that weeps too often and—even when it laughs—does so with cheeks still moist with tears.