Tuesday 1 December 2009

Take a risk

Today


Lots of phone calls – and lots achieved with these. Also a long face-to-face meeting this morning that got much more done than a string of e-mails. However the ‘ruthless with the diary’ wasn’t so successful: I was doing fine until something cropped up that I hadn’t planned for and I had to spend time on it.

Tomorrow


Last week I ranted about risk – in particular, how risk assessment is both becoming a meaningless bureaucratic process and is making us all unnecessarily risk-averse. In her sermon on Sunday, Rosie spoke about our need for closeness or intimacy with God. She went on to suggest that “the most real way we experience intimacy with God is by taking the risk of loving one another. This will sometimes go wrong and it will sometimes cause hurt, but because the love you have from God is utterly trustworthy you will be grounded enough to handle those risks –and more than that –you will begin to unfurl as a bud turning into a flower. You receive what you long for by giving it away!... Not for Paul the idea of loving God in an ivory castle -we know closeness to God through closeness to one another -warts and all!”

This message was mirrored in Monday’s Thought for the day on Radio 4’s Today. John Bell tells the story of meeting some youngsters in Vietnam. He took the risk of befriending them, resulting in an experience which will stay with him. He ends by saying that Advent is not about fairy lights or turkeys or little donkeys, “...It’s about God taking the risk of entrusting Himself to people who did not know Him, some of whom being of no religious persuasion, so that they might touch Him”

So tomorrow: take a risk and talk to, and perhaps befriend someone who you don’t know.




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