Ruach Risk-Taking is a term developed by Rabbi Rich Nichol. His congregation is called Ruach Israel (Spirit of Israel), so I guess that's where the term comes from. But today I will use the term "Ruach" and apply this to our relationship with the Divine Presence. I thought we might explore together how to exercise spiritual entrepreneurship, on whatever scale, small or large.
The first things one should do is to prayerfully identify a project with a goal attached against the background of these considerations:
Articulate your goal - State what you are trying to accomplish in a brief, muscular statement including some measurable outcome by which you might measure success or failure.
Assess what affordable and reasonable resources you can afford to “invest” in this project. What can you afford to invest in time and money to explore this project?
Act – Take some sort of action toward accomplishing what you have set out to do
Assess your results.
Accomplish - What did you accomplish? And what did you learn about yourself, your team, your context. and your project?
Adjust - On the basis of all of this, make adjustments in your approach.
Again – Repeat the process, beginning with articulating your goal in brief muscular language, including a measurable desirable outcome.
Let's talk about people's biggest fear in all of this. The risk of failure.
This past summer I met the most remarkable man I ever met, Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad, a brilliant man with three PhD's with the gentlest of souls and the purest of faith who has spent much of his adult life being a peace beacon and a peace maker amongst people like Saddam Hussein, Tarik Azziz, Yasser Arafat, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Taliban and Haredi (Ultra Orthodox) Jews, all of whom, in varying degrees, consider him a trusted friend. At the conference where I heard him, he took Yitzhak Rabin's statement, "You don't make peace with your friends (but with your enemies)" further: "We are called to make peace with some bad people." He also reported a conversation with Pope Paul II who suggested to him a credo by which he lives. It is something like this: "Don't take care: take risks." And he does. And the world has been a markedly better place because Canon White, in faith, and as sent by the Prince of Peace Himself, does take risks.
Do I? Do you?
May God guide all of us to some holy Ruach Risk-Taking
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