This summer I left the country for the first time. I got on a plane, then another plane, and another, until finally we landed in Bucharest. It was a missions trip with my church, and we were going to help two wonderful, Godly people, the Bates, further their plan to use outdoor education and community service to heal Romania. The first week we would help them build a ropes course at the base of a mountain. The next week, we would go up into the mountains to help out with a summer camp that they ran. We would be working with adolescents who had participated in the service-based youth groups that the Bates had started all over Romania.

There was a poster detailing the virtues emphasized in the program hanging on the walls of one of the building. It was in Romanian, but the words were easy enough to translate into English. Curaj. Courage. This word caught my eye. It was something I had not thought about in relation to Christianity. The fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, of course. But courage? This was something new. I realized that while I had always thought of courage as a neutral character trait, it was actually vital to the Christian life. And it was something I didn’t have a lot of.

As an introvert, people in general scare me witless (to put it politely). Crowded spaces put me on edge, meeting new people often makes me implode, and having to make eye contact with someone I find attractive is the worst kind of hell. This, however, is something that I have to overcome if I want to be effective for the kingdom of God (maybe not that last bit). I have to find the courage to step out of myself and face the things that scare me if I truly want to follow Christ.

Courage has a lot to do with faith (which, incidentally, is one of the fruits of the spirit). We find courage when we trust that whatever God is doing, it’s what’s best. Maybe not best for us, but best for his plan of redemption. If we truly believe that, we have a reason to have courage. Things are going to be scary, things are going to be hard, things are going to hurt, but we have the promise of seeing God’s face at the end, and that overshadows anything we could possibly encounter in our lives. Keeping this goal in mind, courage feels less like courage than like obedience to a faithful God.