The right response at the right time

At the Agathe Center for Entrepreneurship, we help our clients identify what the right decisions are for the time they find themselves in, and how to respond wisely to changes in circumstances. We are regularly reminded that, for any unforeseen event, it is our response more than what happened which is determining.

A little over two years ago, we entered the COVID-19 era. Those first couple of months were filled with tense discussions about how to react. Many of our clients and contacts had never faced a crisis of such broad implications. Each had to decide whether their responses would be characterized more by faith or by fear. Most will look back on this era as a time of loss, but also of growth. We are always better for the experience of something like COVID when we come through it exercising our faith rather than being dominated by fear.

And now, the latest crisis is a terrible war in a neighboring country where we have friends. It threatens to broaden, and it may have even more severe human and financial implications than COVID. If the COVID-19 era didn’t entirely test us, what we are experiencing now is another exercise in finding the best way to respond.

Essentially, we find ourselves asking the century-old question: “If the foundations are destroyed, what do the righteous do?” (psalm 11). What can we do? What should we do? What should be our response to trauma, destruction and shattered lives? Surely it must be more than just “business as usual.”

Here in Bratislava, we have started to gather funds and getting them to frontline relief efforts. We are also supporting the education of refugee children who have flowed into our community. And we are already thinking about how to help rebuild the businesses and projects of our friends in Ukraine. We believe that time will come. Please be invited to join us in this response – one of faith and not of fear.

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