Dear Younger Self: A Letter from Your Future
Part 4: Take a Risk

Three Truths about Risk:

1. Risk Exposes Our Excuses

• The Untimely Death of Her Parents

• The Unpredictable Nature of the King

• The Undeserving Opposition of Haman


Esther 4:11 (NLT) – “All the king’s officials and even the people in the provinces know that anyone who appears before the king in his inner court without being invited is doomed to die unless the king holds out his gold scepter. And the king has not called for me to come to him for thirty days.”


2. Risk Requires Action
“There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”
—John F. Kennedy


Esther 4:13 (NLT) – “Don’t think for a moment that because you’re in the palace you will escape when all other Jews are killed.”

Esther 4:14a (NLT) – “If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance and relief for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die.”

Esther 4:14b (NLT) – “Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?”


3. Risk Begins with a Single Courageous Step

Esther 4:15-17 (NLT) – Then Esther sent this reply to Mordecai: 16 “Go and gather together all the Jews of Susa and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. My maids and I will do the same. And then, though it is against the law, I will go in to see the king. If I must die, I must die.” 17 So Mordecai went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him.


“One saw the problem there, that a lot of these children were in danger, and you had to get them to what was called a safe haven, and there was no organization to do that. Why did I do it? Why do people do different things? Some people revel in taking risks, and some go through life taking no risks at all.”
—Nicholas Winton