Embracing Courage: The Path to Change

"Courage is the willingness to face danger, risk, and fear square in the eye. This will take a couple of minutes, but it's worth it. The French had collapsed, the Dutch had been overwhelmed, the Belgians had surrendered. The British army, trapped, fought free and fell back towards the channel ports, converging on a fishing town whose name was Dunkirk. It was England's greatest crisis since the Norman Conquest, faster than those precipitated by Philip II's Spanish Armada, Louis XIV's triumphant armies, or Napoleon's invasion barges massed at Boulogne. This time, Britain stood alone." [00:00:44]

"Then, from the streams and estuaries of Kent and Dover, a strange fleet appeared: trawlers and tugs, coasters and fishing sloops, lifeboats and pleasure crafts, smacks and coasters, the Island Ferry, Greyfields, Tom Saw, was American Cup Challenger Endeavor, even the London Fire Brigade's fire float Massey Shaw, all of them manned by civilian volunteers, English fathers sailing to rescue England's exhausted, bleeding sons. Even today, what followed seems miraculous. Not only were Britain's soldiers delivered, so were the French support troops, a total of 338,682 men." [00:02:15]

"Some of our favorite stories in the Bible, even people who don't know the Bible very well, are stories of courage. A frightened Moses, somehow through the power of God, going to Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the world, and saying, 'Let my people go.' In Israel, there was such a man, a boy named David, putting on soldier armor that was way too big for him and then just going alone with a slingshot to face a giant named Goliath." [00:06:39]

"Daniel being thrown into a lion's den, where his friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego being told they must bend the knee or else they will have to be thrown into a fiery furnace. And their statement is, 'O King, we will not do it, for our God can deliver us, but we want you to know, O King, even if he will not, even if he should not, we will not bend the knee.'" [00:07:19]

"A beauty queen named Esther, who had a lot to live for—youth and beauty and wealth and fame and power—saying to her uncle Mordecai, when the history of God's people, the fate of a nation, the prospect of genocide hung on her slender shoulders, 'I will go to the king, and if I perish, I perish.' We are deeply stirred by that." [00:08:02]

"The Paradox in self-esteem is, of course, this oddity that there's very little correlation between all the qualities we think of as being admirable—beauty, intelligence, being successful, being wealthy. People can have all of those, and they may have very low self-esteem. And so they looked at all the studies that were done around self-esteem, and they found this single common thread: that it all has to do with what in psychology is called approach and avoidance." [00:08:58]

"When you're facing a difficult situation, if you avoid it, if you don't look at it square in the eye, if you wimp out, if you run away, even if things turn out well, your sense of well-being, esteem, goes down. But if you approach it, if you look at it head-on, if you move towards it, if you show courage, if you do the difficult thing, even if the situation turns out badly, there's this surge of life inside you." [00:09:23]

"The invitation for you today is to take one thing that produces fear inside you and move towards it. My friend Blues, who was with the Marines for many decades, talked about this quality that they would say, where you run towards the fire, you run towards the gunfire, where everybody else runs away from the danger. That's kind of the human instinct. You run towards it for the sake of your sisters and brothers." [00:10:10]

"Paul's writing about this in Romans 8, and he talks about whatever we're facing—trouble, hardship, famine, persecution, danger, nakedness, sword—so we fear not. Why not? None of those things is able to separate us from the love of God. So what's the worst that can happen to you? Death itself." [00:10:56]

"You may need extraordinary courage today. I think of a woman I know who took a step forward to call into the light what had been in darkness and knew that she would be opposed and the subject of a lot of hostility, and she was, and she did it anyway. I'm just still staggered by that." [00:11:31]

"Maybe it's just, 'I gotta keep going in this situation, in this difficulty, with this ache, with this anxiety, with this depression, facing this opposition. I have to put one foot in front of another one, and I gotta keep going.' You keep going because it is hope that lies before us that enables courage." [00:12:18]

"One thing today that you're afraid to do, one email you're afraid to write, one conversation you're a little bit afraid to have, could be something tiny. You've been putting off looking at your finances, and so you're going to take a look, just, you know, five minutes. You don't like cold, so you're gonna take a cold shower. Whatever it is, just something so you can know, 'I did it.' There's life in it, there's Kingdom in it, there's change in it, and change starts today." [00:12:42]