A blown opportunity

Hadassah:  Cross posted from here

• “We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work” [Thomas Edison]
• “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” [Winston Churchill]
• We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”  [Charles R. Swindoll]
  

I went to the funeral.  It was a funeral much like many others.  Grief and sadness at loss.  Reflection on one's own mortality.  Any many observations about opportunities now lost.

Opportunity to spend more time with someone
Opportunity to invest in another person
Opportunity to repair long-ago hurts
Opportunity to be receive
Opportunity to grow
Opportunity lost

God's plan betrayed?

More often than not the opportunity is lost through no fault but my own.  I'm too busy.  Its inconvenient.  I'm tired.  I want to do something else.  Its not my priority right now.  Someone else will do it.  Its not my responsibility.

My frustration rose through the rest of the day as I spiralled into a moan-mood.  Why should I do it?  Why doesn't someone else do it?  Does this have to fall to me again?

But in thinking about it, I realize the truth embodied in the quotes above.  Opportunities are not negative, they're not simply another job to take on!  Yes, opportunities do take effort, but effort brings returns either now or later.  Every opportunity is a decision point to gain and grow, or to lose and stagnate.  When I protect my personal comfort zone by declining an opportunity to extend myself, then I end up sitting in the middle of my cesspool of self interest.

Opportunity is God's gift to grow more into what we were be created to be.

When I decline an opportunity that God gives to me, I lose.  Someone else also loses.  And another of God's gifts is rejected.

But God promises to bless my efforts spent on the opportunities he gives to me.  My choice.

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