Often the test of courage is not to die but to live!
~ Vittorio Alfieri
Courage is a heart full… strengthened and made supple by Him.
~ Makala Barnabas Doulos
There shall come forth a Shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a Branch from His roots shall bear fruit.
And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what His eyes see, or decide disputes by what His ears hear, but with righteousness He shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and He shall strike the earth with the rod of His mouth, and with the breath of His lips He shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of His waist, and faithfulness the belt of His loins.
~ Seven gifts of His Spirit in Him, to us, in Isaiah 11
Oh beloved, it is true. In and of ourselves, we are apt to run out of energy. The causes we run up against – and campaign for – all have this ability to sap us of the ability to go on. We feel the dis-couragement as our results do not meet our own expectations. And problems are always bigger than our budgets.
And then we remember.
Courage.
Courage, at its root, is the temper of our hearts. And so, if the heart is empty or weak, our courage is more like a desperate last-stand against an invading force. And in the natural, this is a place very easy for a person to be – for our hearts are either small or hard or both.
And then we find Him.
And He pours out His very Self onto and into and through us. And in this pouring, He shatters the small hard stone of our old hearts and replaces it with a soft and enlarged (and enlargeable), fleshy organ which now actually works.
He pours into us His very Self.
He imbues us with His wisdom.
He enables us to understand His will.
He gives us the sense to simply do what is right.
He shares with us His advice and lets us know the direction the Kingdom is heading.
He strengthens the supple new heart with joy.
He builds the knowledge of the holy and knits the sacred into our being.
He trains us in the behavior of Heaven.
He drives away every fear by a power so fearsome that we now only fear one thing. Him. And that fear is so pure that it only makes us want to be closer to Him – and do nothing that would make us ever far from Him again.
Can we see it?
As He fills us with Himself, this does not just improve the texture and feel and smell of who we are. No, this filling actually flushes away the dross of our old man and makes us into something wholly other than who we were before. So now, instead of just holding on and struggling mightily against the falling dark, we ourselves now bring Light and Power and Strength and Goodness to our situations.
We are His body. We are His light to the world.
And so, even as the vast majority of people around us simply ignore the light, or sometimes vamp the comfort of the light we provide, or even disdain the glow in our eyes, we need do nothing other than shine from the fullness He already is, in us. We can, regardless of circumstance or temperature or finance or danger or disease or acceptance or repulsion – stand.
Courage beloved friends. We have good reason for it. And this is very good news.
