where risk meets opportunity

those people reading who know me well...or maybe even not well, you will not be surprised that i have opinions when it comes to the future of the church. and if you don't know me well (and i am not guessing there are many of those people reading, but if there are i just wanted to be sure my salutation bases were covered), you now know that i have opinions about the future of the church. to be clear for everyone involved i mean the church universal, not perhaps my or your local church that you like, dislike, are ambivalent toward, etc.

onward to the meat of all of this.

i have never been too terribly public about some of these feelings, and yet have also never shied away from the opportunity to discuss these things with other people when the opportunities have arisen. that being said, i was recently given the opportunity to do some writing for a website featuring young adults thoughts about the united methodist church. it was free reign to choose what i wanted to, and so i took some of my thoughts previously put here and expanded on them and edited them down some as well. (as a note i haven't submitted them yet, but check back there to see them when they do show up.)

it feels both thrilling and a little bit intimidating to have your words and thoughts put out somewhere for others to judge and (hopefully) read. but i also feel like i have valuable things to say and have been looking for opportunities to be more involved in these type of conversations recently and to reach a broader audience.

the problem in all of this is that i have never been good at risk taking. i have always been the person who double and triple checks things before moving forward in order to minimize whatever risk is there. and this is probably in some ways detrimental. i have no doubt missed out on some opportunities due to these tendencies, and perhaps other opportunities have been available to me because of that same tendency. in my daydreams i want to be a person who takes more risks and does adventurous things with the opportunities in front of me.

perhaps it is not an either/or situation but a discovery of the balance between the two where risk meets pragmatism and opportunity converges with both.