The safest place?

Some have said the safest place to be in the world is in the center of God's plan. I'm not sure that I buy that. The most dangerous place in the world humanly speaking may be in some risk-taking, leap into the unknown. For Naomi and me, our current situation is "much less safe," 30% of our former income in a more expensive place, challenges to my medical care, loss of immediate access to our circle of supportive friends. I have friends who moved their famlies into the "war zones" of Philadelphia-exposing their famlies to enormous risk. So I would rework the saying, "the most deeply satisfying, challenging, faith stretching, emotionally busting, joyful and sadest place to be is that place where we cast ourselves into the vast, scary reaches of the hand of God."

Location to me is not as important as taking those times in life to test where our security, identity, wholeness lie . . again not wreckless irresponsibility; not having no plan or boundaries, but in intentional, knuckle-whitening faith

Theodore Roosevelt

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat” -

Roosevelt-additional thoughts

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

"Citizenship in a Republic,"
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910