Risk Aversion

Recently, after about five years since hearing Mark preach the sermons, I'm reading In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day. It's a short book, and as dense as the fur in a lion's mane.

When I was a teen, a local pet store woner had a lion cub. When I met him, he weighed about 40 pounds. Since cats like me, I figured we would get along.

We did. We wrestled and played, and he knocked me downand grabbed my shoulder in his jaws.

I was wearing a heavy ski jacket and a sweater. Later that night, I had blood blisters on my shoulder from where he was playfully mawling me. That forty pound lion could have killed me. But I was sixteen and invinsible, of course, so it never occurred to me and that half hour, like my ride on an elephant as a very small child, are amongst some of my more interesting youthful memories. Animals are just awesome as far as I'm concerned.

When I was sixteen, I wasn't risk averse. I petted and played with a lion. As an adult, I would probably still play with a forty pound lion cub, though a bit more cautiously.

But would I have the courage, the insanity, to chase a lion, a full-grown lion, into a pit on any day, let alone a snowy one, and then kill him? Not on your life, mine, or the lion's. Yet Benaiah did. Beniah wanted that lion dead. We don't know why, and he was a determined man, wanting something so much he would risk death to go for what he wanted done.

He sounds nuts. So did Noah, so did David. So was Peter getting out of the boat and walking on water. Yet they followed God's calling and took that leap of faith.

That's what it comes down to--leaps, or sometimes for many of us--baby steps of faith.

Step off the curb.