So last month God kept bringing up the same thing over and over and over. That thing would be courage. Wether it be by me reading it, someone saying it to me, it being in my dream, or me seeing an act of it.
So at our contact we were hanging out with the kids watching a movie and a line from the movie said, in regards to a mans father who was a fighter pilot, “you think your dad didn’t have any fear at all when he got in that cockpit? He had a lot of fear, but he had something else, the courage to face and conquer fear.”
The next morning I’m going through my bible trying to figure out what to start reading and out of nowhere I just get this feeling like I need to read Joshua. If you have ever read Joshua you would know that the book is about nothing but courage really. 1:6 “Be strong and courageous…”
So I’m reading through the book just getting pounded with talk of being courageous and then we have dinner and watch another movie with the kids. (Every night except Friday nights were movie nights) The movie this time was We Bought a Zoo, you know, that movie with that one guy who bought that one zoo? Yea, that one. Well one of the lines in the movie goes a little something like this, “Sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.”
So that night as I laid there in my hammock about to go to sleep, I start to recap the past few days and I realize that courage had been the main thing that was spoken to me in the course of a few days. So I start to pray asking God what He was trying to prepare me for with all this courage talk and that night I have this dream. In this dream I’m back home with the kids now occupying my high school. It’s the night before a big game and we are at a bonfire. The game is against Waller high and their school is only about a 45 minute drive from magnolia west. As we are all gathered hanging out you can see that we are ready to take any any challenge that the enemy has for us, but then in single moment, all that changed. From 45 minutes away, we hear Waller high screaming and yelling and making all kinds of noise. As soon as we heard them all the joy, excitement, and fight that was in us left. The cold chill of fear was covering us all like a blanket. People start to walk away and then were formally dismissed, but as they were starting to leave I stopped them. I told them all that the noise they were hearing wasn’t the sound of strength. It wasn’t the sound of power. It was the sound of absolute fear. The enemy knew they were about to get destroyed so what they did was fall back to scare tactics. They knew they couldn’t win in a dog fight, so they were trying to make their bark bigger then their bite. I told them all this and then it clicked to them. They understood that they have have this game in the bag and that nothing the enemy does can change it.
So as I woke up and started the day, only thing that was on my mind was that dream and my life. Everything that happened in the dream was exactly what I needed to see and hear.
Then more of Joshua and more of courage quotes from movies… It just went on and on.
Over the corse of the month I was reading this book about having reckless faith, and not being a “civilized” christian, meaning not just saying God is in the walls of the church and stepping out in absolute faith and nothing else. This book was packed with courage points for me. “To follow christ Is to abandon the luxury of safety and security.” You need to have courage to abandon anything other then Christ that gives you safety and security. (Not going to quote it exactly because I don’t know the exact quote but this is the gist of it) You know your destination. The road is filled with all kinds of obstacles, some of those obstacles require you to have enough courage to jump over them while knowing that God will always be there to catch us, wether it be on the other side or if we fall, we land in his arms. No need to explain that. And then, “When we are born again we are not dropped into a maternity ward, but into a war zone. Our birthplace is less mothers womb and more battlefield earth.” The world in itself is a battle field. You could sit there and hide the whole time in the back behind everyone else or you be courageous, jump out in the middle of it all with your brothers and sisters, and charge the enemy head on tackling any and every obstacle.
And then it happened again on our travel day. One of the guys on my squad told me about how he was having Jesus time and it was in that time where he feels like he realized why God was showing so much about courage, although he didn’t know it yet. He told me about all kinds of things God was telling him.
Here’s what I know and what I don’t know. I don’t know where God is going to take me. I don’t know what He is wanting me to do later on in life. But this is what I do know, I need to have the courage to walk into whatever is in store for me and face any and every obstacle knowing that God is with me.
