Courage to Live Fully
Courage for the Call facilitator, Ruba Powell, shares our common experiences of going through hard times and how our inner strength from God helps us overcome them.
Courage to Live Fully
A Reflection by Ruba Powell
To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half of these things in it is to want half a life, shutting the other half away where it will not interfere with one’s bright fantasies of the way things ought to be.
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night”
I don’t know about you, but I like the years that go smoothly. The ones when all my plans seem to flow, my family and friends are healthy and happy, and there is no turmoil from an unexpected life event. Can you relate to this? If you do, I know you are also telling yourself, like I am, how this is not reality. Life just doesn’t go that way. When we are fortunate enough to have a year with little incident, we call ourselves blessed and know how rare it is. If this is the case, how do we make it in between hardships without falling apart anticipating the next difficult time?
If you are reading this, then you have made it through 100% of the hardships that have come your way, and I have too. You have done this with your own inner strength and your God-given desire to move through and overcome. This strength and desire is in you. It is in all of us, and it is available at the first sign of fear. I am not saying this inner strength is always easy to access, but we can and often do find it. While we cannot always identify how we survive the difficult parts of life, most of the time we do make it through.
There is a loving Presence in the universe that is for you and with you and wants you to succeed and make it through even more than you do. We get held up by our pain, fear, and our conditioned response through difficult experiences. Have you ever watched a child climb up a tree or jump off a diving board? There is often fear there, but subconsciously they know if they can make it to the top or make that splash, it is going to feel really good. Life as a grown up is not quite so simple, yet in the same way, when we look back and acknowledge that we have made it through a hard time, that can also feel really good. When we notice this feeling, we come to trust that there is a force greater than our own understanding holding us up. Not just us, but everyone and everything.
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