Courage

I've been thinking a lot about courage lately because I've been realizing more and more how much I lack it. The thing is, I didn't really want this..this courage.. desperately enough to ask for it before. I may have kind of wanted it in my head but I didn't want it with my being because of fear (again the fear) that I might have to do uncomfortable and scary things. It wasn't until I realized the disturbance and influence of fear in my life when I decided to truly ask for courage.

For example..

I feared conflict...so I avoided them.

I feared some stuff that happened in the past...so I lived a defensive, passive aggressive and sometimes angry life.

I feared making a fool of myself...so I never tried anything that might make me look like one.

I feared possible or potential hopeless situations...so I lived as though I was already defeated. 

So I started looking up definitions and quotes on courage and came across some that stirred my soul.

Courage is fear that has said its prayers.  ~Dorothy Bernard

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.  It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.  ~G.K. Chesterton

Courage is a peculiar kind of fear.  ~Charles Kennedy

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.  ~C.S. Lewis

Courage is doing what you're afraid to do.  There can be no courage unless you're scared.  ~Edward Vernon Rickenbacker

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.  ~Ambrose Redmoon

The first and the last ones are my favourite. I want to be able to say with my life.. "Yes I am sometimes scared to death to live a kind of life that You have called me to live but I am going to do it anyways because there is something more important and more powerful than the influence of fear. Jesus has overcome the world!  And I am His and He is mine."