"While it is day"

I was asked to go to Virginia to speak about something to a group of college kids, and I was leaning toward saying no. That was yesterday. This morning while driving I passed a nursing home and thought about Virginia again.

It's the usual fears cloaked in excuses---plausible excuses---that prompt my "No's" to the occasional invitations I decline: "They assume I'm a good writer but I'm just average." "They assume I'm more godly than I am." "They assume I know something I don't." "This is all a huge mistake." "Beware of the Peter Principle---the tendency to be promoted to the level of one's incompetence." "I will end up dishonoring God and embarrassing them. Not to mention me."

It's easy to say that's the voice of the devil. But as a matter of fact, two Augusts ago I did screw up my courage to take on a job that seemed to fall into my lap (a "God thing"?), but that I was not equipped for it, and I failed miserably. In hindsight I think that was one opportunity I should have declined. Ironic, isn't it? Sometimes I mistake cowardice for wisdom, and sometimes I mistake courage for folly.

To make matters more confusing, God used my employment debacle of two years past as an improbable springboard into a better (as in more amenable to my single-parent life) line of work. Let me be clear: I am philosophically sophisticated enough to understand the fallacy of "post hoc, ergo propter hoc." I realize that my fun little daily blogging job may well illustrate God's mercy and not his "well done." Nevertheless, you see the dilemma.

But part of wisdom, I suppose, is being on to one's besetting sin tendencies, the better to factor them into one's decision-making process. And in my case, no one has ever known me to be brave. That's a point to consider. And that brings me back to the Virginia thing. Are my reasons for wanting to decline truly reasonable and wise, or are they masquerading fear?

Well, you know how it goes. God doesn't do postcards. Most often, stepping out in faith is not so much a certitude regarding your endeavor as a faith that God will be there to catch you if you've guessed this one wrong. And so you agonize a while over your pro and con list, and then it's all about choices. You step out into life beyond yourself (which occurs to me to be a good a description of biblical faith).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in The Cost of Discipleship:

"The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity (that is, in truth, into the absolute security and safety of the fellowship of Jesus), from a life which is observable and calculable (it is, in fact, quite incalculable) into . . . the impossible situation in which everything is staked solely on the word of Jesus."

Last month I went to my daughter's "Back to School Night," and in one of the classrooms there was a poster with a picture of a basketball hoop on it and the words: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Koheleth put it this way: "Cast your bread upon the waters" (Ecclesiastes 11:1). Jesus put it this way: we have to venture out and do stuff "while it is day" because "night is coming when no one can work" (John 9:4).

The nursing home is breathing down my neck. In that place no one will have any recollection of whether I bombed or did well in Virginia. No one will know or care that I even went. Except me.

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