You Will Need Courage

“Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt

The rain came suddenly and it came hard, and finally there was a break. My wife, our three kids, and myself grabbed our things and ran out to the car to take advantage of the break in the weather. We had been camping with some friends for the weekend, and we had enjoyed a couple days in the forrest away from the distractions of TV, internet, and cell phone reception. The morning of our departure the rain had come on like a bear and buckets of water fell from the sky. Due to the remoteness of the location there was no signal that reached us to warn of the flash flood coming our way. 

GPS signal was also out so I took off down the road blindly trying to remember my way and hoping that eventually service would pick up and we could adjust our route. Somewhere along the way I think it took a right when I should have gone left and I found myself traveling along a narrow back woods road that followed right beside the Allegheny River. 

As the road began to dip lower I noticed the river was angry, and it was growing fiercer and fiercer. I looked up ahead and saw that water had begun to cover the road just 30 yards from my car. I stoped to assess the situation. It didn’t look all that deep, I was in a solid SUV, but I knew that the water could be deceitful. Ive seen too many videos people getting swept out because they misjudged the depth of the water. I looked in my rear view mirror and noticed that just behind me, a chunk of the road was breaking away and sinking into the river. I looked back at my three kids sitting in their seats, and over to my wife and I knew it was on me to get us out. I couldn’t go back, I couldn’t stay still, and the unknown depth of the water in front of me was terrifying. But I had to go forward.

As I look back, this story represents what can happen to us all as we face our calling. It takes courage to put our life in drive and trust him as we step into the water of the unknown in front of us, not knowing how deep it will get. We know we cannot go backward in our lives, standing still will not help us at all, we can only go forward. And for that we need courage.

We need courage to pursue God’s call on our lives and so do the people around us. God gave us some tools that we can use to help each other follow the way.

Encouragement and discouragement. 

Encourage: to give someone the courage, or the will to act even in the face of fear.

Discourage: to try and take away someones courage or will to act. 

When you encourage someone you are giving them the courage to act in a certain way, even in the face of fear. 

When you are discouraging some one, you are taking away that courage in hopes that they will abandon a path or action that you don’t want them to engage in. 

We use both all the time.

I encourage my son to to eat his vegetables and try new foods, I want him to face the fear of discomfort of taste or the unknown and have the courage to eat things that will be good for him.

I discourage him to eat too much sugar, I take away his blind courage to eat all the sugar he can get his hands on. 

Encouragement and discouragement can be done in passive or obvious ways. 

I think as companies push forward with automated messages and robot answers on a phone it is getting harder and harder to get in touch with a real person. 

This is set up to passively discourage you from taking up the time of a paid employee, and keeping their costs down by needing less employees. 

They aren’t saying, “hey don’t call us, use our machines to solve your problems.” But the system itself is set up to make you not want to bother a living person and just solve your problems with their automated services. Its passive

An example of obvious discouragement would be speeding tickets. It is telling you that the pain of a ticket, is going to be greater than the pain of getting some where late, so let me take away your courage or your will to act in this way.

With encouragement it works the same in giving someone courage, and it also can be passive and obvious as well. 

One thing to remember with encouragement and discouragement; they both can be used for good or for evil. A carrot to entice you, a stick to scare you. 

There are various sticks and carrots being used around you by voices around you that are trying to get you to go one way or another. And the voice you listen to and obey will determine which path you take.

Some of these voices can be our own internal voice, intrusive thoughts, the voice of our parents or our peers from the past, the voice of what we think or assume others are thinking, the voices of God, the voice of the devil. 

All these voices can lead you down different roads, encouraging you and discouraging you to keep going, or to jump off of the road your on and take a different path.

The question is tho whose path do you want to go down? And where do these paths lead? 

When we say yes to following Jesus it means walking in agreement with Him that He is “the way” the truth and the life and that His path leads us back into forever relationship with the Father. 

So if you want to follow “The Way” it is His voice that you will need to learn to listen to. He will encourage you always to follow His way and discourage you when you start to follow other voices and wander off the path.  

These other paths will lead to death but His way, THE WAY always leads us into relationship with Our Father, and into LIFE. 

Note: Being disconnected to His voice is like when I was out of service and driving into a flood. You could be well intentioned and go off of the path, miss the alarms, and wind up putting yourself and others at risk.

At the end of the day our calling leads back to loving God and loving others. We need connected to the father and we need to be able to hear HIS VOICE to walk well in what He has made us to do and serve the people we are called to serve.

-Phil Morris-