Monday, February 21, 2005

Risk Taking

The sermon yesterday was Called: "Developing a Daring Faith: Risk Taking". During the sermon, I was thinking about risk taking. It seems to me that this is the way people really feel alive. For some, it’s the adrenaline thrill or the endorphine rush: that’s living! The day-to-day, punch-a-clock, sleep-through-it, necessity-driven, slog-it-out, this-isn’t-what-I-ordered life really isn’t living at all.

This is where things like sk8boarding and extreme sports come in; I think that sk8ers are a spiritual lot. They are searching for something new, whether it’s a new high from landing a trick or the search to express themselves through the art of skating or even if it’s the high they find in a bottle or pill. They are looking for something transcendent. So are adrenaline junkies and speed freaks, when you get right down to it. All that they want is to feel alive, and it’s risk-taking that gets us there.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like Christians have a reputation for taking risks or, for that matter, for feeling alive. We have a reputation for chasing adrenaline junkies off our property. We have a reputation for singing boring old irrelevant music (whether that assessment is true or false isn’t part of this discussion!), a reputation that says we’ll die before we change, and a reputation that says we don’t want to really live.

So what would it take for us to shed that reputation? For us to live a little bit? For us to take some risks? Leave me a comment . . .

1 comment:

EYouthWNY said...

It would require us getting over ourselves. We need to shed the idea that we are, or have to be, right. We need to accept that it's a journey not a destination.

We need to focus on love not law.