The American mainland is apparently now within range of North Korean missiles, bringing the prospect of nuclear attack to my generation for the first time (the Berlin Wall fell nineteen days before I was born).

It’s safe to say at this point that we are involved in another cold war, although this time it’s with a country smaller than Missouri and lacking the capability the old Soviet Union had of annihilating the US over the course of a lunch break. But the Soviet Union, for all its atrocities, was run by calculating men who proved unwilling to subject the world to nuclear war. By contrast, it’s distressingly unclear whether the leaders of North Korea are, in fact, sane.

The threat posed by North Korean nukes can be greatly exaggerated, but it is real. It’s also a good opportunity for American Christians to reflect on how to live in the face of potential horrors. The obvious answer is that we must live by faith, and this is certainly true, but we need to be careful about what we mean, exactly, by the word “faith.”

Faith is not believing that God will automatically shield us from physically and emotionally devastating events. On August 9, 1945, a B-29 dropped the atomic bomb “Fat Boy” on the Urakami district of Nagasaki. Urakami happened to be the location of the largest Roman Catholic community in Japan; seventy percent of the district’s Catholics died immediately in the blast, and many more would later succumb to radiation poisoning.

In one of two occasions that nuclear bombs have been used, followers of Christ (living in an superlatively non-Christian country) died by the thousands. God can and does protect his children, but not always. The scriptures are completely honest on this score. There is no one-to-one correspondence between faith and physical safety: no magic barrier against gamma radiation, no infallible supernatural means of keeping madmen with loaded assault rifles from walking into your church on Sunday morning.

Faith is living in the awareness that active shooters, failed relationships, economic collapse and North Korean missiles cannot separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. In some incomprehensible way, Christ experienced that very separation so that we never will. There will never be a horror that we must endure alone, as he endured the cross alone.

I personally think it unlikely that the Bomb will come for us any time soon. But it might, and even if it does not we could very well find ourselves facing some other individual or national crisis. When that day comes, may the sun rise on us having prepared ourselves, little by little, through prayer and scripture and Christian community, to walk by faith.