Risking Small

Woke up out of a dream in which a couple agreed to adopt triplets, but as soon as the adoption was final, found out all three infants were blind. Doctors told of a procedure that could repair the optic nerves, but no guarantee. Husband was furious, accused the bio-father of fraud, wanted to annul the adoption or add contingency for successful surgery. His wife turned to him—said when you have a baby, you don’t know what’s coming and whatever arrives is yours and you can’t give it back. She reminds him that he’s built businesses from the ground up, that he should know that a life being lived without risk is not being lived at all.

Then I woke up.

How do our minds come up with this stuff? I’m not sure dreams ever give us information we don’t already know, but they certainly direct attention where we may not know it needs to go. My wife wanted to know the end of the story, but I suppose that wasn’t the point. The non-ending leaves the choice midair. What would we do? What place does risk hold in our lives?

We’re all at risk, even before we take our first breath.

The question isn’t whether we can live without risk, but whether we can accept the risk of being alive. Security is an illusion we pile around ourselves in money and material until it dawns on us just how fragile we are. Maybe Christmas can help, understood as the story of small, risky beginnings—Jesus born a helpless infant to a helplessly poor couple, risking being small to reveal a big truth.

We may be willing to risk big, hoping to acquire enough to become risk-free. But there is no such thing. Human control always fails. Jesus was willing to risk small, a child who never grew out of childlikeness. If we want to find something hidden by a child, we must get on our knees to see the world from a child’s height. If we want to find a big truth hidden by a childlike God, we must get on our knees, let humility empty our illusions of control.

The story of Jesus’ birth is the story of our rebirth. Jesus, born into the vulnerability of a child, risked the smallness of never growing out of it. The story of our rebirth is to risk growing back in.

 

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