COURAGE

Christ and His followers are COURAGEOUS.

As part of my scripture study goal this semester, I am trying to find attributes of Christ and His followers in the scriptures that I can implement into my life.

I think one of the attributes that I need to work on the most is courage.

Courage has been an interesting journey for me. I feel like at times in my life, I have had courage to match Esther's approach to the king, the early apostles' rejoicing in persecutions, and Abraham following God's confusing command to sacrifice Isaac. I felt faith-filled and immovable--willing to stand up for what I believed in, even if I trembled in the process.

But then someday, I started to feel fear creep into my heart, and I didn't feel quite so courageous.

I tried to focus intently on the word courage, hoping that directing my mental energies towards the concept would foster it inside myself. It got to the point that I focused on the word "courage" so much that I started to fear the grandness of it, and I feared that I didn't have the courage enough to gain enough courage to do whatever God asks me to.

I still feel kind of courage-less sometimes. I fear that I won't say or do the right thing or stand up for my beliefs or obey whatever commandment God gives me that I may not understand. And for that reason, I decided to study courage in the Topical Guide of the LDS Edition of the scriptures.

As I read, my heart was filled with comfort. Here is one of the passages I was lead to:

Joshua 1:7 "Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest."

I love how in this verse, we aren't told to have courage just so that we can get by in life happily. We are commanded to have courage so "that [we may] observe to do according to all the law." God wants us to obey His commandments because He knows that, though difficult at times in the moment, they bring lasting joy. But He is also aware of the amount of courage it sometimes takes to be obedient to those commandments, especially in such a difficult and wicked world. By reading this verse, I am comforted to know that God wants me to be able to have courage. He wants me to be able to have that peace of mind before God wherever I am. And He wants me to be able to reap the benefits of having the courage to obey Him so that no matter where I am, He can prosper me because I have turned unto Him and acted in a way so that He can be my God and I can be one of His people.

I still have a long way to go in the area of courage, but I hope to trust God and work with Him to become more courageous, little by little. I think that as we pray and do little things to obey God (or, as a woman I look up to recently told me, "Do one thing every day that scares us"), in time our courage can grow and we will have greater confidence that we are on the Lord's side and He is on ours.

Love you all lots.

Fear not.

God clothes the lilies and He is taking care of you, too.

Love,

Abby