The world is full of horrible things. The world is full of war and famine and disease and disaster. Atrocities occur. Some things don’t have a neat answer, and most injuries don’t heal overnight, but stay painful and debilitating for weeks, months, years, generations. Sex trafficking. War. Terrorism. Divorce. Shootings. Mental illness. Deaths of loved ones. The list continues. I could write a paper on this alone. But my point is that sometimes, we are shaken to our foundations.

Sometimes, all the goodness we think we know seems to drop out from under us. Sometimes, this world shatters us like a sledgehammer takes to a wine glass. If nothing that has really, really messed you up has ever happened to you, I am glad for you, and yet you are not exempt from my audience, because everyone has witnessed something that made their stomach turn, and everyone has felt anxious. We carry this sickness inside us. Most of the time, our fears stay buried under routine. When you strip a lot away, to some degree or another, everyone is afraid. Some people are more afraid than others.

Why should we be brave in the face of these things? Better yet, why should we be unafraid? (I’m speaking for my sake as much as yours:)

Suffering does not have to be futile. We are allowed to grow through everything that happens to us, if we can keep from being bitter. Sometimes we don’t know the reasons why things happen to us. Most of the time, we don’t get to decide what happens to us. But we do get to choose how we react. That power remains ours, and our choices always matter. The bold choice is the hard choice, but it is also the best choice. See Romans 5:2-5 (esv)--we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us-- we can be brave because our hope is inside us.

Good is an absolute. For all the evil in this world, good is not any less real. It’s image is not distorted or tainted or changed, or it’s not good anymore, and good is still good. It is separate, like it is holy. Maybe it’s just me, but I find the solidity of this idea comforting.

Nothing will separate us from the Love of God. Neither height nor depth nor angels nor demons nor powers nor anything else you care to name. So we have someone backing us up, even when the situation looks utterly desolate and such a thing seems impossible. Honestly, I’m still struggling on this one. I don’t know why we’re allowed to go through things that are just too hard for us to not be deeply scarred (think: sledgehammer, wineglass) by. Love, no matter how strangely and sometimes seemingly cruelly it works, is not an impotent force. And no matter how things seem, Love is truly Love, like good is truly good. God is not being duplicitous when he says he loves us and yet lets us be shattered into pieces. Love is real. And Love wins. (Romans 8:31-39)

Fear is the enemy of passion. It inhibits the self. When you’re afraid to express yourself, you don’t. And that’s a problem because we humans, we create ourselves by expression. The way we dress, the way we talk, the way we act all form and shape our identity. When we wear something unusual, we feel different. When we speak on a subject, we aren’t just saying what we think, we are identifying ourselves with the positions we state, strengthening these ideas within ourselves, developing them as part of ourselves. The same thing applies to actions. If you act with hatred toward someone, you’ll begin to hate them, if with love, you may just grow fond of them. The way you act toward someone helps to define your relationship with them.

But if you do none of these things, your thoughts remain undeveloped, stagnant, and infantile. That is why I say the number one enemy of creativity and progress and passion and love of others is fear.

Finally, as I mentioned a little bit before, it’s our choice to be unafraid in the face of everything in this world. Your choice belongs to you. You should act without fear because you can act without fear. You might feel afraid, but feeling afraid and acting out of fear are very different. If I didn’t do things I was afraid of, I’d probably barely leave my house, honestly. This will probably take some practice and involve a lot of failing. That’s okay. One step at a time.