As you evaluate your response to the risks involved in leadership, are you careful or fearful? Every next generation leader must wrestle this question to the ground. What you don't know can hurt you. As a leader, what you don't know can paralyze you. Are you consumed by thoughts such as these: What if it doesn't work? What if I'm wrong? What will others think of me?

As Paul Naeger reminds us in his excellent article Red Flag Decision Making, Emotions serve a purpose, informing us what to do. If our brain comes across something and categorizes it as a "red flag," we will be notified through thoughts and feelings created by emotion. This "red flag" alerts us to pay attention. Our emotions act as a cueing system notifying us to pay attention and take action.

I don't know about you, but there have been plenty of times when I have driven home from a hospital visit wondering why they let me be the pastor.

Most of us want to be proven right more than we want to know what's true. We aren't on truth quests. We're on confirmation quests.

But David felt something else as well. A tension. A hesitation. Something wasn't exactly right about all of this. But that inner hesitation made no sense in light of the circumstances in which he and his loyal men found themselves.

It is amazing what can be accomplished when we wait on God to lead us out. It is equally amazing the mess we can make of things when we charge out on our own.

Striving for balance forces a leader to invest time and energy in aspects of leadership where he will never succeed. It is not realistic to strive for balance within the sphere of our personal leadership abilities. …discover your zone and stay there. Then delegate everything else.

Seasoned leaders rarely regret having taken risks. Even the risks that didn't pay off directly are viewed as a necessary part of the journey. A leader's regrets generally revolve around missed opportunities, not risks taken. Many of those missed opportunities would not have been missed had they been willing to push through their fear and embrace what could be. Fear, not a lack of good ideas, is usually what keeps a man or woman standing on the sidelines.

I tell the girls in our student ministry, "You don't really want sex. What you want is intimacy. You want to meet a guy, fall in love, and know you can trust him completely. You want somebody with whom you can share everything there is to know about you without fear of betrayal or rejection. You want to be fully known and to know him fully. Purity now paves the way to intimacy later.

If a teenage guy tends to overreact when he fails, there is a pretty good chance he thinks his significance is based on success.

Direction, not intention determines your destination.

Often, stepping outside your comfort zone is not careless irresponsibility, but a necessary act of obedience.