W.E. Krill, Jr. M.S.P.C.

    Years ago (OK, decades ago) I discovered a truth that has become something fundamental to me: “No risk, no gain”.  Every good idea, every good venture, every good relationship in life involves a degree of risk. I’m not talking about foolish risk or unnecessary risk, but the kind of risk that in the same moment is anxiety producing and exciting.

    The risk of a career move, the risk of getting married (and having children), the risk of writing a book without assurance that it will get published or that anyone will subsequently want to read it, the risk of traveling out of the country on a long and tedious trip. Life is full of both good and bad risks.

    When I was younger, I used to think that the way to mitigate risk was to be ultra-prepared and have gobs of courage. While being well prepared and having courage are indeed key elements of managing risk, there still needs to be a tolerance of, well, the risk. As I have gotten older, I have tended to take less of these good risks than I used to.

    But then along came an insistent and annoying idea. At first I thought it was an idea that came out of my musings with a friend, but then he began to speak more seriously about the idea, and then so did I, and the next thing you know, we go and decide that the idea is in fact not our own, but an idea from God. Now, if it had been me alone, I might have passed off the idea as just an interesting fantasy, but when the idea kept coming up between my friend and myself, over and over, for more than a year, it became clear it was not just my whacky idea.

    This forced me to reconsider what I thought was my nice, neat concept of risk. Once you throw God into the mix, it changes things. Boy, does it change things. There is that whole Abraham and Isaac thing that brings faith into the concept of risk. And so now this idea that my friend and I share is moving forward into something that looks like it will be real. And while we are very excited about it, it’s really scary as well, because it involves some financial and reputation risk.

    But courage is no longer an issue, because of God’s involvement. Faith makes courage moot.