Risk

Like it or not, we're all risking something.

I work in law enforcement, but it doesn’t feel like I’m risking my life every day. Technically, sure, but statistically, all I’m risking is a heart attack in twenty or thirty years. Most of my days are pretty boring. Poeple living in war-torn regions and religious minorities in certain countries are at much greater risk, simply by existing where and when they do.

I wonder if they feel they have no choice but to stay.

I wonder if Martin Luther King Jr. knew how much he was risking.

I wonder, if his wife knew that he would be shot, would she be able to convince him to back away from the Civil Rights Movement? Let someone else take his place at the front?

I don’t think so. King would stay right where he was. Not out of pride. He was not arrogant enough to think that others could not have led the charge, done the same things.

I think his reasoning would go something like this:

“I am going to die from this movement. That’s a fact, unavoidable. It’s either going to be from a bullet or from my own compromise. If I do as you say and abandon the cause, I will abandon myself at the same time, and that will be the exact moment that I die.

“I’m not deluded. It’s not that the Movement itself has become my identity, my personality. It’s that my identity, who I am, the man you married, would believe that this cause is worth dying for. And by shrinking from the ball, I am not just betraying my teammates, I’m betraying myself. I’m killing myself. And the man you will have to live with after that will not be me. It will be a more cowardly, hypocritical, regretful, and resentful version of me.

“You might not notice it at first. I’ll hide it well for the first few days, maybe even months or years. But soon, you’ll start missing the old me. The one that died when you convinced him to change, to compromise.”

Most of us could benefit from a conversation like this. Most of us aren’t knowingly risking our lives. But all of us, on a daily basis, risk killing ourselves in one hundred tiny ways.

If you believe in something, don’t you dare compromise on it just to make your life easier. Because afterwards, it will no longer be your life. It will be someone else’s. Someone you like a little bit less.