Experiment

The lazy person claims, “There’s a lion out there!
    If I go outside, I might be killed!”- Proverbs 22:13

We can Dear Reader, be terrified by fear. Fear when mastered, can be useful to us for survival, conversely, when uncontrolled becomes Satan's tool.

It works both ways, as this proverb implies. Not only does fear prevent people from doing things, they use it as an excuse for their own laziness.

"Take no risk, I am safe, it's better where we are, change is bad!" become our catch cries 

The truth is, change is inevitable, but the growth which could come with it, is not!

We need to take risk, or a believer would say, we need to show faith.

We cannot let the thought of future failure paralyse our present.

Yet often, those who claim to follow the carpenter, do just that. They desire not to rock the boat, or change what seems to be presently working FOR THEM.

Worse still, they can idolise the past, "remember when we used to do this?" they ask.

We may not be trapped by fear of lions, but we are easily trapped by nostalgia.

The solution. To give permission to fail.

We need to allow a culture of experiments.  Edison said "I have simply found 999 ways not to create a light bulb", here was a man who was never afraid to make a mistake. Yet the whole world is lit because of his perseverance.

In the community of faith, do we give permission to one another to experiment, knowing that we may discover 999 ways not to reach the lost, before we discover the one which does?  Yet if given permission, maybe like Edison, our perseverance of the message of the carpenter, may light the world.