Trusting God and taking risks

“Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days. … He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap.

“As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.

“In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good” (Ecclesiastes 11:1-6).

This is an invitation to take risks, both financial and personal. And the reasonableness of taking risks, though not explicitly stated in these verses, is woven throughout this book and the whole Bible: God is the living God and He is in control of all things and He is for you, child of God. If there were no God, or if He were not good, or if we were not His children, then it would be foolhardy to take risks. It would be foolish to do anything but act with the greatest concern for “taking care of number one,” as they say. This is what the foolish Dwarfs did in C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle. They were so busy protecting themselves that they never lived. They missed out on all the good things that come from risking and trusting:

“‘You see,’ said Aslan, ‘they will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison, and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

I’m familiar with this because I have been in my own prison for many years and am just climbing out. It is not a prison that most people have observed (or if they have, they haven’t told me) or that is obvious at a glance. But it may as well have been bars and a dead-bolt lock. I have been afraid of making overtures to people that might not be received, that might get me rejected. Some of these people have been my own adult children. I have been afraid of being “a bother.”

Sometimes you can “cast your bread on the waters” in a dozen ways—like sending money to every missionary who comes down the pike—but end up failing to see that you have not “cast your bread” in that one area you’re not trusting God in. Let us take inventory of our souls and see if there are areas of our lives where we have not let God in, and have refused to go out on a limb for Him.