Risk! (part 1 of 3)

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Risk! (part 1 of 3)

One thing I could never be accused of is being afraid to take risks. Risk has been so interwoven in my life it is akin to an old comfortable pair of shoes.

Watching those around me, I am constantly amazed at the fear of risk most people exhibit. Now I am not talking about stupid risks like walking on the edge of a tall building. I am talking about the fear of failure that causes life-paralysis in so many people. They stop truly living and surrender their dreams to the reality of an ordinary run of the mill life.

Not trying to realize your dreams, in order to remain comfortable, seems almost criminal. Someone once said, and it is my life-quote, “it is never too late to be what you might have been.”

Thinking about this subject has resulted in some interesting revelations about why some people try to avoid risk.

1. Embarrassment – Nobody wants to look bad. And if you take a risk and fall flat on your face, you might embarrass yourself. So what? Get over it. The only way to get better at anything is to take steps forward. That includes missteps that can cause you to fall down. Making small steps is even better than standing still. Success is not one step; it is a series of steps. If you stumble once in a while, shake it off, and let it go.

2. Rationalization – This is the “second guessing” trap. Second guessing everything they do to the point of procrastination. A great quote goes something like this, “Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” If you take risks and fail, you will have fewer regrets than if you do nothing and fail.

"Timendi causa est nescire"
The cause of fear is ignorance

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Antithesis

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For a better understanding of what I am firmly convinced is the absolute truth I offer the following quote:

"If the truth of the Christian faith is in fact truth, then it stands in antithesis to the ideas and the immorality of our age, and it must be practiced both in teaching and practical action. Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless."

Francis A. Schaeffer

One of the major issues of our age is the absolute lack of unity of our professed beliefs and our daily actions. So many today make a claim to be "Christian," while their actions leave me scratching my head. It is amazing how much biblical knowledge can be gained today with our vast arrray of resources, yet the lack of literacy shown by believers, the many divisions within the body of believers, and simple pride makes one wonder if most people are even serious about their faith.

Schaeffer uses the word "antithesis" throughout his writings to accurately describe the foundation of an accurate worldview. When people have beliefs, and act in ways that are in direct opposition to what the Bible teaches, the worldview they profess to have doesn't represent the foundational antithesis required by the Bible. Therefore can this type of person claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ as described in the Bible?

It is not for me to judge someone's eternal destination. Only God and that person truly know the answer to eternity. Although without evidence of Biblical conformity, or an outright rejection of Biblical standards, there is a problem.

"We must acknowledge and then act upon the fact that if Christ is our Savior, he is also our Lord in all of life. He is our Lord not just in religious things and not just in cultural things such as the arts and music, but in our intellectual lives, and in business, and in our relation to society, and in our attitude toward the moral breakdown of our culture. Acknowledging Christís Lordship and placing ourselves under what is taught in the whole Bible includes thinking and acting as citizens in relation to our government and its laws. Making Christ Lord in our lives means taking a stand in very direct and practical ways against the world spirit of our age as it rolls along claiming to be autonomous, crushing all that we cherish in its path."

Francis A. Schaeffer


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Not Always Comfortable

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"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end. If you look for comfort you will get neither comfort or truth- only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with, and in the end despair."
C.S. Lewis

Not everything that is comfortable is true.
Comfort is not necessarily an indicator of truth.
In fact; if we are never made uncomfortable, we may live out our
lives with the notion we are the creators of reality.
But some day...maybe not today, nor tomorrow...but some day we will
all bump up against the truth.
And if we "make it up," then on a really bad day we will be
unable to convince ourselves otherwise because
we cannot lie to ourselves forever.

concordia cum veritate
"In harmony with truth"

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Hiring The Right Person, Not The Right Resume

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There is a key passage in a book that I read several years ago, and as I read the book again this passage really speaks to church hiring problems.
The book is a very detailed book on the how, what, who, and why certain business are successful and others are not.

This is a quote from a paragraph dealing with one such successful business:

“Successful companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience.”

The church should take note of this fact, and face the hard reality that hiring people based heavily on non-character issues does not work well in the short term if it works at all, and will never work in the long run.

“We judge ourselves by what we are capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”
Longfellow

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