it's a theme...

Today after publishing the previous entry, I made my rounds on the blogs of others and found this...

...at the end of our lives, we’ll regret opportunities missed a lot more than mistakes made.

That conviction is backed up by the research of two Cornell sociologists, Tom Gilovich and Vicki Medvec. According to their study, time is a key factor in what we regret. Over the short-term, we tend to regret our actions. But over the long-haul, we tend to regret inactions. Their study found that over the course of an average week, action regrets outnumber inaction regrets 53% to 47%. But when people look at their lives as a whole, inaction regrets outnumber action regrets 84% to 16%...

...Does it bother anyone else that the church is known more for what we’re against than what we’re for? We can do better than that can’t we? Instead of pointing our finger at what’s wrong with culture, the church needs to offer better alternatives. We need to make better movies and better music. We need to write better books. We need to start better schools and better businesses.

In the words of Michelangelo, we need to criticize by creating.

I have a core conviction that drives my ministry: there are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet. That is what gets me up early and keeps me up late. I can’t imagine a more exciting time to be doing church. Podcasting is e-vangelism at the speed of light. Blogging is digital discipleship without borders. Our generation has an unprecedented opportunity to fulfill the Great Commission if we simply redeem technology and use it to serve God’s purposes.

But we need to stop doing ministry out of memory and start doing ministry out of imagination. We need to stop repeating the past and start creating the future. We need to stop being so afraid of doing something wrong that we don’t do anything right.

Read the full article: Inaction Regrets: Go Jump off a Cliff by Mark Batterson