Courage.

I sit down to write to you this morning feeling humbled. It’s Monday morning and I’m coming off 4 days of being a counselor for my churches kid’s camp.  We took 600 kids to Daytona Beach and on the last day they baptized about 100 of them in the ocean before our return.  It was a powerful week.  But what I wasn’t expecting is the Lord to take me away to Daytona and really open my eyes.

Robert Madu did a fabulous job speaking this week and my biggest takeaway was this: ‘It is easier to walk in what is familiar than to walk in freedom’.  Smack.  This one hit me right across the face.  I have been walking in the familiar.  I’ve been playing is safe and the Lord is trying to pull me out of this place and into what He has for me.

I came home Saturday with my head swimming.  I had some big decisions, some tough conversations, and some changes to make after having my eyes opened last week being away.  I woke up Sunday morning sick and spent the day playing catch up around the house and entertaining three friends who came in and out throughout the day to spend time with me and chat.  I muscled through some of what I’d been thinking with one of these friends and when she left, I jumped in with both feet.  

Today before I head to work I’m reviewing what I will be leading my bible study through tonight.  Our lesson is so fittingly on courage.  She writes that courage is grown in the mundane, small pieces of our lives.  This is where my failure lies.  In the mundane.  In the small, seemingly ‘no big deal’ things in my life I have lost sight of freedom and I have clung to the familiar. 

Later she had us read Psalm 27 and these words leapt off the page to meet me: Wait for the Lord; be strong and let your heart take courage.  Oh how sweet those words rang true to me this morning.  I have to let, allow,  and encourage my heart to take courage and be strong. I am learning to stop clinging to the familiar and walk courageously towards what the Lord has for me.  It is thrilling, exciting, and terrifying in equal measure.  But as Jennie Allen so wonderfully said in this weeks study 'you are going to wish that you had not live in fear'.

Love,

B