Are you Afraid of the Dark?

What is courage? Mostly, I relate  courage to what I see in the movies but feeling that kind of courage in my real life is non existent. In terms of the extreme drama of cinema, I most certainly do not carry a gun and shoot bad guys. No one kidnaps my loved-ones or threatens to frame me and put me in jail. Nothing to that intensity asks of my courage.

So what does courage look like for the common, humdrum man? Courage is doing something you absolutely do not want to do because you know it has to be done. Your humanity screams “no” but your divine imprint says it must be done.

When I was young, the biggest monster in my closet was public speaking. So, I enrolled in public speaking classes. And then the fear of swimming, so I learned to swim. There was the fear of riding a bike. And the fear of indoor skydiving. The fear of driving in the dark. Or the fear of flying. These have all been faced with courage in my life. It doesn’t take away the fear in the moment or prevent it from coming back the next time the situation has to be faced.

Courage is not saying “I am not afraid of you.” It is saying, “I will not be controlled by you. I will not let you dictate the direction of my life.”

And your courage is never alone. It blossoms out of faith. In the same way, I trust in the engineers who designed the airplane and pilots who fly it and the towers who guide them, I trust God in things that He has made. Life is unpredictable. We can not control today or anything around the corner for that matter. But we trust in the engineer of life itself and the One who designed our intimate beings. He is the Creator of my thoughts and dreams. The Lover of my soul. A perfect recipe for someone I wish to trust.

Of what are you afraid? What things have you conquered or faced in the past?