We were made to be courageous

When was the last time you did something that truly rattled you to your core? Something that made you so uncomfortable that there was no way you could ever return to how you were before?

We are constantly surrounded by fear, constantly worried about what others will think about us, worried about being reprimanded for an action. Fear dominates most of our lives, a fact that is truly sad.

Because we were made to be courageous. We were not meant to live our lives in fear; we were not designed to cower from every dangerous or uncomfortable situation. There’s something so crippling about the effect fear has on us. It has the power to completely shut us down, the power to destroy us, the power to immobilize our thoughts and actions.

This world is full of fear. The fear of going out and not knowing whether you will be a victim of one of the next school shootings or the fear that at any minute one of your loved ones could be stripped away from you. The sad fact that two young girls can’t walk down the street without having to worry if she’s going to be sexually harrassed.Every time we get into our cars there is that still small fear present that someone might crash into us, the fear that no matter how loud we turn up our music is still there. On a lesser scale, there is the fear of everyday social life. The fear of rejection when you finally work up the nerve to ask someone out or if you do something different from the norm keeps us from doing what will truly make us happy. We are so worried about what others think of us that we let that fear dictate our lives and our happiness.

It’s easy to find the horror in this world, easy to see just how much we have to fear in this world, just turn on the news. But here’s the beauty: we were made to be courageous. We are not meant to fear, we are meant to stand up.

We were not created to cower in the corner. We were made to be courageous.

Who cares if your peers don’t agree with the clothes you’re wearing, or the amount of makeup you wear, or the hobbies you enjoy doing? It’s time to take a stand.

You see, there’s a difference between being courageous and being fearless. Fearless implies that there is no fear to exist; it simply ignores the presence of fear. To be courageous is a completely different thing. To be courageous is to acknowledge the existing fear and conquer it, to stand up to that fear and defeat it.

This world is full of violence, sadness, death, and pain. I can’t wait to see the day when people aren’t falling victim to cancer, or when I can turn on the television and not be bombarded with hundreds of shootings. I can’t wait to see all of the darkness and pain and suffering that exists in this world to come to an end. But until that day, we should choose to be courageous—to see the fear that constantly presses in on us from all sides and stand up to it. We need to choose to do something about the hurting, to stand up to the fears that plague our lives and to overcome them.

Because after all, we were made to be courageous.