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“There’s a difference between playing it safe and being safe.”

A thought by Bob Goff from his book, Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People (p. 87). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.) 

There are so many people who strive to always play it safe.

Bob says, “What I’ve come to learn so far about my faith is Jesus never asked anyone to play it safe. We were born to be brave. There’s a difference between playing it safe and being safe. A lot of people think playing it safe and waiting for all the answers before they move forward is the opposite of dangerous. I disagree. If our life and our identity are found in Jesus, I think we can redefine safe as staying close to Him. Don’t get me wrong. Playing it safe and waiting for assurances in our lives isn’t necessarily bad; it just isn’t faith anymore.”

He goes on, “Playing it safe doesn’t move us forward or help us grow; it just finds us where we are and leaves us in the same condition it found us in. God wants something different for us. His goal is never that we’ll come back the same. He’s hoping we’ll return more dependent on Him. I’m not saying everything needs to be risky in our lives, but we’d be well served if a few more things were riskier in our faith. Loving people we don’t understand or agree with is just the kind of beautiful, counterintuitive, risky stuff people who are becoming love do.

“Every day we get to decide if we’ll take it easy and fly over the mountaintops in our relationships or make ourselves better and find our way through the valleys. Heaven and a world full of hurting people are hoping we will. The Bible talks about this. It says when our faith gets tested, we have the chance to grow. This makes sense to me. Stated differently, if we want our faith to get stronger, we need to navigate some deep places.”

Bob also says, “The truth is, I only reluctantly go through difficult times or deal with difficult people. When I do, I’m quick to complain to myself about what a raw deal I got and how unfair it is for such a nice guy like me to have such hard things happen or have to deal with such difficult people. People who are becoming love understand God guides us into uncomfortable places because He knows most of us are too afraid to seek them out ourselves. It happens to me all the time, and I usually only recognize in hindsight that the hard places I’ve navigated helped me steer a more purposeful course forward. This has been God’s idea for us all along.”

Someone said that a rut is a grave with the ends knocked out but so many of us live in a rut.  So, what about you?  Are you ready to open wide your life to God and let Him steer a more purposeful course forward?  Are you?

Yes, yes!
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