“In the day of your planting, you hedge it in. In the morning, you make your seed blossom, but the harvest flees away in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.” (Isaiah 17:11 WEB)
As I contemplated writing on this topic, I remembered with nostalgia a derivative product offered by investment bankers globally, that’s called ‘hedging.’ It’s quite sophisticated that it’s not that popular in developing capital markets but it’s a veritable risk management strategy in developed markets.
In very volatile economic and financial systems, investors protect themselves from the vagaries, uncertainties or unpredictabilities inherent therein. In analyzing their risk acceptance criteria vis~a~vis the principle of risk – reward trade off, they may decide to hedge against any future loss or systemic shock. In a nutshell, hedging is all about transfer of risk by taking equal and opposite positions in the cash and futures markets.
This risk management strategy may serve its purpose in the very uncertain worldly systems; howbeit, you cannot eat your cake and have it. There’s always a risk – return tradeoff.
Applying this risk management strategy in matters of destiny may most likely short change your harvest, if not fully wasted in the long run. Our text gives us an allegory of the implications of hedging in life. It may bring comfort in the morning seasons of life but in the long run destiny is not maximized; rather it’s wasted and unfounded in the day it’s most needed.
And this supposed comfort derivable from hedging enervates The Comforter from providing the much needed comfort that guarantees visible change of levels throughout the changing and challenging scenes of life.
Hedging in life is a trick of self or more sophisticatedly, a derivative of the devil. To avoid risk is to buy the trick of comfort and self-assumption. Permit me to submit that risk avoidance is riskier than informed risk taking. Staying in your comfort zone or doing normal things may lead to forfeiture of destiny without knowing.
Hear this: To hedge in life is to put your destiny on the edge and not at the cutting edge! To hedge is to wedge your blessings. Therefore, stop hedging!
We can afford to be done with hedging, especially when you know that you have a very certain future in God; and in turn you decide to take the most wholesome risk of believing in His capacity to do exceeding abundantly above all that you ask, dream, desire, hope, think or decide according to His power that is at work in the life of every believer in Christ.
This very life is programmed to favor the risk takers especially when taken to favor society and improve our shared humanity. What more do I say then? Happy, favored and fortunate is the man or woman that makes the Creator of the game called Life his or her Coach.
In conclusion, the following 8 attitudinal points will definitely help you to stop hedging if you imbibe them. Here are the 8 points.
1. Be conscious of the creative force in you.
2. Be intelligently courageous.
3. Doubt your fears and execute in faith.
4. Be an inquisitive, voracious and broad learner.
5. Take the “wholesome risk” of believing God’s Word without doubting.
6. Avoid the temptation of making excuses for inaction or average/normal actions.
7. See every challenging situation or season as a precursor to your change of level.
8. Be mindful of the fact that your actions have equal and opposite reactions. You get what you sow and at the same measure – nothing more!
To the stopping of hedging,
✝️Tochukwu Kemakolam
Prime Minister