Go, and I Will Go with You

“Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.” — Exodus 4:12 (ESV)

When Amanda became convinced God was calling her to leave New York and go out preaching, everything about it was against her. She was a Black woman in a time when most ministers — including Black ministers — did not believe women should preach in public at all. She had no ordination. No church board stood behind her. No salary. No education to speak of. And she was being sent, of all places, to a town called Salem, New Jersey, where she did not know a single soul. When the sense came that she should go, she pushed back hard, asking God again and again to make it unmistakable, half hoping he would change his mind.

He did not, so she started getting ready with almost nothing. She needed to pay her rent and she needed shoes — her only pair was broken through the sole, and she knew wet feet in winter would make her sick. She did not tell anyone; she made her needs known only to God. She prayed for the money for shoes and, remarkably, told God she would trust him for them so completely that she “put them on as really as ever I put on a pair of shoes,” claiming them by faith before they existed. Days later an old man at a meeting pressed some money into her hand as she left. She got home, counted it — five dollars, the first time anyone had ever just handed her that much — and remembered: the shoes.

Then the doubts turned personal and mean. As she stood ironing, the accusation came: Jesus sent his disciples out two by two, and here you are going alone — people will say you are just going out to find a husband. That one stung, because she knew people would talk. She set down her iron, got on her knees, and asked God to send someone to go with her if she was meant to have a companion — and the answer that came was simply the promise he had already given: “Did I not tell you that I would go with you?” She had forgotten it. She got up in peace and went alone.

What should grab you here is how much Amanda had to lose and how little cover she had. She was not stepping out with a scholarship, a title, a team, and a safety net. She was a poor washerwoman defying what nearly everyone around her thought was proper, walking into a strange town on the strength of a conviction she could not prove to anyone. Every practical fact said stay home. She weighed the mockery, the loneliness, and the risk — and decided that obeying a God she could not see was safer than disobeying to keep herself comfortable.

You will face smaller versions of this constantly: the thing you are fairly sure is right to do, but that no one is requiring, no one is applauding, and plenty of people would find weird or presumptuous. “Who do you think you are?” is a powerful sentence, and it stops a lot of people cold. Notice that the accusation Amanda faced was not even about whether God had called her — it was about what people would say. She learned to tell the difference between God’s guidance and the crowd’s opinion, and to act on the first even when the second was against her.

One thing to do: identify one right thing you have been putting off mainly because of how it would look or what people might say — not because it is wrong, just because it is exposed. Take the first concrete step on it this week, alone if you have to. Do the thing you are fairly sure God would have you do, before the fear of looking foolish talks you out of it.