I think the start of the year is a great time to plan taking risks. It is what Andrew Douglas calls rolling my wrist too far on the throttle in his blog entry, The Reward of Risk.
It is an excellent piece where he tells the story how they quit their jobs, sold all they owned, moved their kids across the continent and started a learning journey that is giving their kids a real kingdom roadmap they can refer back to in order to find their way as adults.
Risk is the 3rd of the 5 learning verbs (imagine, connect, risk, reflect and celebrate).
In many ways I think all the verbs run through ‘risk’. I also think we need to imagine in order to see something to risk (kingdom possibilities); we need to connect to help make risk happen; we continually need to reflect to find God in it all and celebration (joy) gives us the strength to keep trying.
A learning community needs to be built around risk. In fact the church desperately needs to move away from the Just-in-case model of information delivery to the Just-in-time risk model of taking a step of faith with each bit of learning and then coming back to reflect, celebrate and imagine the next step. Leave the harbor and sail the high seas.
Risk is simply faith applied. Faith with shoes on. Faith that gives more away. Less stuff and more action.
Yes it’s time to get scared. My rolling my wrists too far is the 1 million labourer challenge. Help mobilize a million labourers in the next 5 years. It is a John the Baptist ministry, calling out in the desert: “prepare the way…”. It is an incomplete but real experiential learning event for 40 days of ‘testing’ that points to a more complete lifelong learning style as a disciple.
So what is it going to be? Will you become more risk agile in 2014 by practicing real steps of risk? These will lead to open doors. Your imagination will be fueled. New connections will appear. It will be beyond what you can currently can ask or imagine.
It is time to wake up the sleeping giant.
From the self-appointed secretary of your Risk Fan Club.
Jim,
I love your theme of risk. It moves us away from safe shores of ‘certainty.’ Sometimes I feel that we followers of Christ extrapolate ‘doctrinal certainty’ (or orthodoxy) as requiring a kind of ‘experiential certainty.’ i.e. operating within known and certain limits.
If we truly ‘know’ the object of our faith, Jesus, we know that He is ‘not safe,’ but He is good, as Aslan put it! He is the one who showed us how to step out by faith in numerous daily, relational situations.
May 2014 be a year that propels you and your readers forward in many God-honouring ways!
Warmly,
Ross
Found it interesting that in his latest newsletter, ‘Moving with the Holy Spirit’, Brad Long
also urges us to forget New Year’s resolutions. Instead we should be asking how Jesus
is calling us to follow Him in 2014. Brad suggests we pray on how can we participate in what God has already planned.
WOW! risky business,
Hang on to your hat and open the throttle!!!