I attended a funeral today for a person that meant a lot to my wife when she was growing up.

The funeral was in a church in a rural community an hour west of St. Louis.

The church was filled with grey haired men and women – many into their 90’s. There were also, of course, numerous younger people representing their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

I was surprised when the pastor began the service – he was maybe 35 years old. From the makeup of the community, I expected him to be much older.

During the service, my mind wandered and I could almost see the board meeting of church leaders debating whether to hire such a young pastor.

I imagined that the church must have had a problem of losing young families as they failed to connect to the previous leader (later confirmed).The board was made up of elders and they knew it was their responsibility to keep the church strong for the next generation.

At the end of my mental movie, I imagined that it must have taken a lot of vision and courage to create such fundemental change.

Vision to see that they had a problem (attrition of families) and to see a way to fix it (young vibrant leadership).

Courage to actually do what they knew was right (make a change and possibly alienate or infuriate some parishioners).

In another part of my life, I was involved in similar type of decision. It involved creating a change with the hope of making something work better (for confidentiality reasons I am purposely being vague).

The vision was in seeing that we had an opportunity to make something better and to better use someone’s talents.

The courage was the knowledge that the person might not see it that way – or that others may not agree at first.

I think that our lives (both personally and professionally) contain numerous opportunities to create positive change and to solve problems if we can just have the vision to see it.

Then, the change actually happens when we have the courage to take a controlled risk to make it happen.

What problems or opportunities can you see if you open your mind?

Do you have the courage to make it happen – even if it’s hard?

Marc Bluestone