My husband and I used to chaperone camping trips for our church youth group. At breakfast each morning, we would exchange stories about how the prior evening had gone with a cabin full of middle school kids.
Since my husband’s cabin was full of boys, the stories revolved mostly around the hotly contested nightly poker games. The ante? Goldfish crackers and mini marshmallows. They played hard and fast and almost always went “all in”. The term “all in” in poker is when you push all your chips to the center of the table, betting everything you have on just one hand. If you win, you win everything. If you lose, you lose everything.
In poker, you usually need to have a lot of confidence in your cards or be extremely desperate to go all in. My husband said that in these games it was neither. For the boys, it was simply about the fun and excitement of playing the game and risking everything they had on the chance of winning it all!
Of course, it’s easy to risk it all when we’re talking about goldfish crackers and mini marshmallows. Right? But that’s not how the boys saw it. This small band of risk-takers was not concerned with losing what they had, they were only concerned with what might be gained.
Too often, we look at the cards we have been dealt in life, and we pass on playing the game. We don’t like the cards we have been given so we sit and wait for better cards. In essence, we do nothing.
In life, when we go all in, we look at our cards and we play them. For better or worse. We decide that it’s now or never and we quit waiting for something better to come along. In other words, we stop wishing for a miracle and take action instead.
Not living the life we are given is the biggest risk of all.
Isn’t it time we went all in? Isn’t it time to risk what we have for something that we believe in? Isn’t it time to stop waiting and start pursuing our dreams and passions? If not now, then when?