Topic : Risk

In Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft, Thor Heyerdahl tells how he and a crew of five crossed the Pacific Ocean from South America to the South Pacific Islands on a crude raft of balsa logs bound together with hemp rope. During the three-month journey in 1947, they had little control of the direction of the raft and no way to stop its forward progress. They learned early in the voyage that anything dropped overboard was almost impossible to recover once it passed behind the raft.

Two months into the voyage and thousands of miles from land, Herman Watzinger lost his footing and went overboard. The raft, driven by a strong wind in heavy seas, moved ahead faster than he could swim. The five remaining men were horrified for their friend. They tried to throw him a life belt on a rope, but the wind blew it back at them. In seconds, Herman was all but lost to their sight in the tumble of waves.

Suddenly Knute Haugland grabbed the life belt and dove into the water. He swam back to Herman and wrapped his arm around him, holding his exhausted friend and the rope while the men on the boat drew them back to the boat.

Effective evangelism requires that someone risks and takes the gospel to the one who is lost.

Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific, by Raft

Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little, when we arrive safely because we have sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess, we have lost our thirst for the waters of life; having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity; and in our efforts to build a new earth, we have allowed our vision of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas where storms will show your mastery; where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars. We ask you to push back the horizons of our hopes; and to push into the future in strength, courage, hope, and love.

Sir Frances Drake Quoted in OC Missionary Prayer Letter of Jeanie Curryer, September, 1997

When the late Nadine Stair, of Louisville, Kentucky, was 85 years old, she was asked what she would do if she had her life to live over again.

“I’d make more mistakes next time,” she said. “I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.

“You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, and a raincoat. If I had to do it over again, I would travel lighter than I have.

“If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.”

Bits & Pieces, January 5, 1995, pp. 13-14

Have you heard the story of Charlie Riggs? Over 50 years ago, he came to Christ and was discipled by a young man named Lorne Sanny, who himself was being discipled by Dawson Trotman, founder of the Navigators.

Charlie was willing to grow in Christ, but he was a bit rough around the edges and didn’t seem very promising as a Christian leader. When Lorne wrote to Dawson, he told him that Charlie Riggs was the only man he was working with and he felt discouraged by the prospects. Trotman wrote back and said, “Stay with your man. You never know what God will do with him.” So, Lorne Sanny continued to work with Charlie Riggs.

A few years passed and a young man named Billy Graham came on the scene. In 1952, the Navigators “loaned” Charlie Riggs to the Graham team to handle the follow-up in their early crusades. He planned to return to the Navigators eventually. However, he worked out so well that he stayed with Billy Graham.

In 1957, on the eve of the famous New York City crusade at Madison Square Garden, the crusade director suddenly had to be replaced. Who could they get? The lay chairman suggested Charlie Riggs, but Billy Graham wasn’t sure if he could handle the job. “All he does is pray and quote Scripture.”

The layman insisted, Charlie Riggs got the job and the rest is history. The New York campaign became a model for the many crusades that would follow in later years. Billy Graham said, “I didn’t think he could do it. But I had this peace—that Charlie so depended on the Holy Spirit that I knew the Lord could do it through Charlie.”

Charlie Riggs retired after many years of effective service to the Lord. What was his secret? How could a man with little formal training rise to such a high position and hold it for so long'

He says, “I always asked the Lord to put me in over my head . That way, when I had a job to do, either the Lord had to help me or I was sunk.” God was delighted to answer this prayer time after time. He put Charlie Riggs in over his head—and then bailed him out.

So many of us dads play it safe with our families. We pray only for what we think we can handle. Our answers are small because our prayers are small.

Here’s a challenge. Let’s take Charlie Riggs’ prayer as our own: “Lord, put me in over my head.” It’s safer to stay in shallow water where you can always feel the bottom under your feet, but the real challenge is to jump in where the water comes up over your head. What are the challenges we face when we’re in over our heads? Job changes, teenagers, college costs and church schedules to name a few.

How about it, dads? Are you ready for some excitement? I am. Let’s ask God to put us in over our heads. And then, let’s watch God keep us floating just when we think we’re about to sink. - by Ray Pritchard

From “On the Father Front,” Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer, 1995.

Someone has said that there are two kinds of people in the church: risktakers and caretakers. If the risktakers in the church are fueled by the caretakers, they will all go to the undertaker with little to show for their lives. Playwright Neil Simon said, “If no one ever took risks, Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.”

Today in the Word, February 28, 1997, p. 35

• It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt
• If no one ever took risks, Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor. - Neil Simon, playwright
• You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere. - Charles Kettering
• “One of the reasons why mature people stop growing and learning,” says John Gardner, “is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.” - Eating Problems for Breakfast by Tim Hansel, Word Publishing, 1988, p. 32.
• Hudson Taylor, the great man of faith who founded the China Inland Mission, integrated faith and risk. He said, “Unless there is an element of risk in our exploits for God, there is no need for faith.” - Leading the Way by Paul Borthwick, Navpress, 1989, p. 153.
• Half of life is “if.”
• A calm sea does not produce a skilled sailor.
• You miss 100% of the shots you never take. - Wyane Gretzke
• You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
• Running red lights is the No. 1 cause of car crashes in American cities. Annual cost to society: $7 billion in damages, medical bills, and lost work time. The average amount of time saved by running a red light is 50 seconds. - US Department of Transportation, quoted in MSC Health Action News, Jan. 1996

No one ever stubs his or her toe while standing still. Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly. But above all, try something!” Failing to try because of a desire to be secure results in inaction and failure to lead.

John Henry Jowett, a great English preacher, likewise pointed out the temptation of self-preservation and its result in faithless lives:

It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows through the cultivation of an insignificant life. Indeed, if a man’s ambition is to avoid the troubles of life, the recipe is simple: shed your ambitions in every direction, cut the wings of every soaring purpose, and seek a life with the fewest contacts and relations. If you want to get through the world with the smallest trouble, you must reduce yourself to the smallest compass. Tiny souls can dodge through life; bigger souls are blocked on every side. As soon as a man begins to enlarge his life, his resistances are multiplied. Let a man remove his petty selfish purposes and enthrone Christ, and his sufferings will be increased on every side (emphasis mine).

Leading the Way by Paul Borthwick, Navpress, 1989, p. 86

There was a very cautious man
Who never laughed or played;
He never risked, he never tried,
He never sang or prayed.

And when he one day passed away
His insurance was denied;
For since he never really lived,
They claimed he never died!

Source unknown

Some things that appear dangerous are actually much less hazardous than their safer-looking alternative. Commercial airline travel, for instance, is 30 times safer than transportation by car. It may not seem that way to the person who would rather fight rush hour traffic on the ground than ride a solitary Boeing 747 at 35,000 feet. But out of 5 million scheduled commercial flights in 1982, only 5 resulted in fatal accidents. Being carried by tons of metal thrust through the air by huge jet engines is actually safer than being pulled along in an 8-cylinder machine that never leaves the ground.

Our Daily Bread

A ship wrecked off the New England coast many years ago. A young member of the coast guard rescue crew said, “We can’t go out. We’ll never get back.” The grizzled old captain replied, “We have to go out. We don’t have to come back.”

You can live on bland food so as to avoid an ulcer; drink no tea or coffee or other stimulants, in the name of health; go to bed early and stay away from night life; avoid all controversial subjects so as never to give offense; mind your own business and avoid involvement in other people’s problems; spend money only on necessities and save all you can. You can still break your neck in the bathtub, and it will serve you right.

Eileen Guder, God, But I’m Bored, quoted in Holy Sweat, Tim Hansel, 1987, Word Books Publisher, p. 48

Winners see risk as opportunity. They see the rewards of success in advance. They do not fear the penalties of failure. The winning individual knows that bad luck is attracted by negative thinking and that an attitude of optimistic expectancy is the surest way to create an upward cycle and to attract the best of luck most of the time. Winners know that so-called luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. If an individual is not prepared, he or she simply does not see or take advantage of a situation. Opportunities are always around, but only those who are prepared utilize them effectively. Winners seem to be lucky because their positive self-expectancy enables them to better prepared for their opportunities.

When asked by a news reporter how she thought she would do in one of her early career swimming meets in the United States several years ago, 14-year-old Australian Shane Gould replied, “I have a feeling there will be a world record today.” She went on to set two world records in the one-hundred- and two-hundred-meter freestyle events. When asked how she thought she would fare in the more testing, grueling, four-hundred-meter event, Shane replied with a smile, “I get stronger every race, and besides…my parents said they’d take me to Disneyland if I win, and we’re leaving tomorrow!” She went to Disneyland with three world records. At 16 she held five world records and became one of the greatest swimmers of all time, winning three gold medals in the 1972 Olympics. She learned early about the power of self-expectancy.

Denis Waitley in The Winner’s Edge (Berkley Books) quoted in Bits & Pieces, March 4, 1993, pp. 13-15

These words by James Bryant Conant have special meaning for writer James Michener. In 1944, when Michener was nearly 40, he was serving in the U.S. Navy on a remote island in the South Pacific. To kill time, he decided to write a book. He knew that the chances of anyone’s publishing it were practically nil. But he decided to stick his neck out and give it a try. Michener had decided that the book would be a collection of short stories. A friend told him that nobody publishes short stories anymore. Even so, he stuck his neck out and went ahead. The book was published and it got few reviews, but Orville Prescott, the book reviewer for The New York Times, reported that he liked the stories. Others decided they liked the book too, and it wound up winning a Pulitzer prize. Kenneth McKenna, whose job it was to evaluate books for a Hollywood film company, tried to persuade his company to make a movie out of it, but the company decided the book “had no dramatic possibilities.” So McKenna stuck his neck out and brought the book to the attention of composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. When Broadway cynics heard that Rodgers and Hammerstein were planning a musical called South Pacific, they guffawed and said, “Have you heard about this screwy idea? The romantic lead is gonna be a guy past 50. An opera singer named Ezio Pinza!” Everyone knows what happened after that. “You can understand,” said Michener, “why I like people who stick their necks out.”

Bits & Pieces, August 20, 1992, pp. 11-13

Forget about the concept of a town hall meeting to decide public policy. How about this instead? In Ancient Greece, to prevent idiotic statesmen from passing idiotic laws upon the people, lawmakers were asked to introduce all new laws while standing on a platform with a rope around their neck. If the law passed, the rope was removed. If it failed, the platform was removed.

Quality Press, August, 1992

The Irish Potato Famine (1846-1851) resulted in a 30 percent drop in the population of the west of Ireland. The prolonged suffering of the Irish peasantry had broken the survivors in body and spirit. John Bloomfield, the owner of Castle Caldwell in County Fermanagh, was working on the recovery of his estate when he noticed that the exteriors of his tenant farmers’ small cottages had a vivid white finish. He was informed that there was a clay deposit on his property of unusually fine quality. To generate revenue and provide employment on his estate, he built a pottery at the village of Belleek in 1857. The unusually fine clay yielded a porcelain china that was translucent with a glass-like finish. It was worked into traditional Irish designs and was an immediate success. Today, Belleek’s delicate strength and its iridescent pearlized glaze is enthusiastically purchased the world over. This multimillion-dollar industry arose from innovative thinking during some very anxious times.

Bits & Pieces, June 25, 1992

When Jean-Claude Killy made the French national ski team in the early 1960s, he was prepared to work harder than anyone else to be the best. At the crack of dawn he would run up the slopes with his skis on, an unbelievably grueling activity. In the evening he would lift weights, run sprints—anything to get an edge. But the other team members were working as hard and long as he was. He realized instinctively that simply training harder would never be enough. Killy then began challenging the basic theories of racing technique. Each week he would try something different to see if he could find a better, faster way down the mountain. His experiments resulted in a new style that was almost exactly opposite the accepted technique of the time. It involved skiing with his legs apart (not together) for better balance and sitting back (not forward) on the skis when he came to a turn. He also used ski poles in an unorthodox way—to propel himself as he skied. The explosive new style helped cut Killy’s racing times dramatically. In 1966 and 1967 he captured virtually every major skiing trophy. The next year he won three gold medals in the Winter Olympics, a record in ski racing that has never been topped. Killy learned an important secret shared by many creative people: innovations don’t require genius, just a willingness to question the way things have always been done.

Reader’s Digest, Oct., 1991, p. 61

The things we most fear—crashing in an airplane, being killed by a burglar, dying on the operating table—are unlikely ever to happen to us. “We are risk-illiterate,” one safety expert says. “We have a completely distorted view of life’s real perils.” The chance of dying in a commercial airplane crash is just one in 800,000. You are more likely to choke to death on a piece of food. You are twice as likely to be killed playing a sport as you are to be stabbed to death by a stranger. And the chance of dying of a medical complication or mistake is tiny (one in 84,000). You take a far greater risk riding in a car. One in 5000 of us die that way.

The next time you buy a lottery ticket, bear in mind that you are at least 13 times as likely to be struck by lightning as you are to hit the jackpot…In helping to set insurance premiums, actuaries know that this year approximately 765,000 people in America will die of heart disease, 68,000 of pneumonia, 2000 of tuberculosis, 200 in storms and resulting floods, 100 by lightning, another 100 in tornadoes, and 50 of snakebites and bee stings.

Other experts can tell you that, on average, being 30 percent overweight knocks 3.5 years off your life expectancy; being poor reduces it two years; and being a single man slashes almost a decade off your life-span (unmarried females are luckier—they lose just four years off their lives.)…It has been calculated that for every cigarette you smoke, you lose ten minutes off your life expectancy…The grim predictability of mortality rates is something that has long puzzled social scientists.

A few years ago, in fact, Canadian psychologist Gerald Wilde noticed that mortality rates for violent and accidental deaths throughout most of the Western world have remained oddly static all through this century, despite advances in our technology and safety standards. Wilde developed a controversial theory—risk homeostasis—postulating that people tend to embrace a certain level of risk. When something is made safer, they will somehow reassert the original level of danger. If, for example, roads are improved with more and wider lanes, drivers will feel safer and go a little faster, thereby canceling out the benefits that the improved roads confer. Other studies have shown that where an intersection is made safer, the accident rate invariably falls there, but rises to a compensating level elsewhere along the same stretch of road…

As the story goes, an American businessman named Wilson, tired of the Great depression, rising taxes and increasing crime, sold his home and business in 1940 and moved to an island in the Pacific. Balmy and ringed with beautiful beaches, the island seemed like paradise. Its name? Iwo Jima.

Bill Bryson, Saturday Evening Post, September, 1988, “Life’s Little Gambles”

A mural artist named J. H. Zorthian read about a tiny boy who had been killed in traffic. His stomach churned as he thought of that ever happening to one of his three children. His worry became an inescapable anxiety. The more he imagined such a tragedy, the more fearful he became. His effectiveness as an artist was put on hold once he started running scared. At last he surrendered to his obsession. Canceling his negotiations to purchase a large house in busy Pasedena, California, he began to seek a place where his children would be safe. His pursuit became so intense that he set aside all his work while scheming and planning every possible means to protect his children from harm. He tried to imagine the presence of danger in everything. The location of the residence was critical. It must be sizable and remote, so he bought twelve acres, perched on a mountain at the end of a long, winding, narrow road. At each turn along the road he posted signs, “Children at Play.”

Before starting construction on the house itself, Zorthian personally built and fenced a play yard for his three children. He built it in such a way that it was impossible for a car to get within fifty feet of it. Next…the house. With meticulous care he blended beauty and safety into the place. He put into it various shades of the designs he had concentrated in the murals he had hanging in forty-two public buildings in eastern cities. Only this time his objective was more than colorful art…most of all, it had to be safe and secure. He made sure of that.

Finally, the garage was to be built. Only one automobile ever drove into that garage—Zorthian’s. He stood back and surveyed every possibility of danger to his children. He could think of only one remaining hazard. He had to back out of the garage. He might, in some hurried moment, back over one of the children. He immediately made plans for a protected turnaround. The contractor returned and set the forms for that additional area, but before the cement could be poured, a downpour stopped the project. It was the first rainfall in many weeks of a long West Coast drought. It if had not rained that week, the concrete turn-around would have been completed and been in use by Sunday. That was February 9, 1947…the day his eighteen-month old son, Tiran, squirmed away from his sister’s grasp and ran behind the car as Zorthian drove it from the garage. The child was killed instantly.

Swindoll, The Quest For Character, Multnomah, pp. 81-2

In 1982, “ABC Evening News” reported on an unusual work of modern art—a chair affixed to a shotgun. It was to be viewed by sitting in the chair and looking directly into the gunbarrel. The gun was loaded and set on a timer to fire at an undetermined moment within the next hundred years. The amazing thing was that people waited in lines to sit and stare into the shell’s path! They all knew the gun could go off at point-blank range at any moment, but they were gambling that the fatal blast wouldn’t happen during THEIR minute in the chair. Yes, it was foolhardy, yet many people who wouldn’t dream of sitting in that chair live a lifetime gambling that they can get away with sin. Foolishly they ignore the risk until the inevitable self-destruction.

Jeffrey D. King