Item: 1 white pawn (Part II)

Sometimes people, including me, don't act because they fear doing the wrong thing.  If I haven't decided anything yet, it can't be the wrong decision, and there's some comfort in that.  However, by not deciding, eventually some of the options go away, which is in effect a decision - and the worst kind, the kind that is forced on me.  It's like a Windows dialog box where the only thing you can choose is "OK."

Since I happen to believe in God, it can also be really easy to want to know for sure before I do something that it's what God wants me to do.  There are a million ways to put things off while trying to get this sense of security in doing the right thing.

I think of people in the Bible who didn't wait, and whose actions God honored, like Jacob, who managed to engineer what he wanted out of life, and like the woman in the New Testament who broke through the crowd and touched Jesus in order to be healed, or the men who cut a hole in the roof and lowered the paralytic down.

When I think about it, almost always when I've taken huge gambles, it's turned out well.  It's not like God can't turn me around if I am going the wrong way anyway.

All of this pawn stuff is basically random pieces of conversations and sermons from the last few weeks.  It's not original thinking, but things that I knew a long time ago and may have somehow forgotten.  It's really nothing more than repeating these things to myself here, remembering to guess how my life might be different if I weren't waiting for anything.