Risking Everything

The following article is my answer to The Sandbox Writing Challenge — Exercise 14

---

 

RISKING EVERYTHING

by

Kelvin M. Knight

What risks have I taken in my life?

My life has been a continuous adventure in risk taking. My earliest childhood memory is of me involving myself in a risky, if not the riskiest, situation: life or death. Sometimes I wonder if God’s plan for me, or to put it another way, the project heading stamped on his manilla folder for my life, reads: Throw Himself In At The Deep End. It is only now I am hearing His loving response to this: And I will teach himself and others how to swim in the wildest seas, the calmest lakes.

With this in mind, I nonetheless struggled with a response to this exercise’s question. I tried several openings, and endings, but they didn’t seem risky enough. Then the natural response I made to Ivor’s response to this question echoed in my mind.

Such a risk, Ivor, but such rewards.

Yes, that’s it. I think we take risks, not because we want the unpleasantness to flow into our lives, but because we are thinking of the rewards, those earthly rewards, the three F’s as I am calling them: food, finance, friendship. There is health, too, and fellowship. FFFHF. Looks like a chemical symbol for some new element, maybe even a hexadecimal number gone wrong?

Which got me musing. Is there a wrongness in taking risks? If there is, there must also be a rightness. Risks make things happen. Risks bring things to the surface. Risks progress situations and people. Every serious project nowadays has a Risk Management section, maybe even warrants the expense of a Risk Manager.

Does that mean our lives should be about risk management, maybe even risk mitigation? I don’t think so. Life is a risk. Life is fragile. All things beautiful are.

And the most beautiful thing in life is being aware there are rewards beyond the physical, and that actually these spiritual rewards are not rewards at all but gifts for all of us. Sometimes we have to risk everything to truly see this, to feel what this means, for us, in the here and now of this moment we call life. To me, this is the greatest risk: choosing to become a citizen of heaven on earth.