Risk, Failure, and Success

Here's a blip from Wide Awake by Erwin McManus I read this weekend. It talks about the parable of the talents. May it encourage you.

"If you are maximizing your capacity, you're on the way to living your life to the fullest. To do this, you must not only take responsibility but also risk. Why did the third servant bury his bag of gold? He was afraid of his master; he feared he would lose his gold and then be punished.

This is where many of us have been misled or at lest have misunderstood. We're absolutely afraid of God. We think if we risk and then fail, then God is going to punish us. We are paralyzed by the fear of failure because we misunderstand the character of God. Life doesn't have a fail safe. Failure is real and can be very painful. God, though, isn't looking at failure but faithfulness. He's not waiting for you to fail so he can punish you or succeed so he can pillage you. He wants to celebrate your life.

If you're living in a way that honors God and taking great risks in pursuing great dreams, and you fail in the attempt, do you really think God is going to slap you around for that? Of course not. God is going to celebrate your effort. God does not measure success the way we do. We look at winning as the measure of success, while God looks at whether we lived. To those who are faithful to what they have been given, to those who use well what has been entrusted to them, even more will be given."

I hope that take a lot of pressure off those of you who fear taking risks because of the consequences of failure. At my previous job as a computer programmer, failure was pretty much a daily occurrence. You write code, it doesn't work, and you have to figure out what you did wrong and then you make it work. It was a continuous cycle of stressful learning, but you learned from every failure and moved forward and got better and better. I guess that's why failure doesn't bother me that much. If I mess up, I confess it and move on. I know God forgives me. There's freedom and security in that.

May this day bring you security, freedom, and lots of opportunities to risk! Blessings on the start of your new week.