courage on Life is Hard

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones. And when you have finished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake!"

Context Once Jesus ascends in Acts 1, the disciples are not immediately out on the street continuing his work. Many assumed Jesus’ mission would bring earthly power, but now they find themselves fear...

Context Once Jesus ascends in Acts 1, the disciples are not immediately out on the street continuing his work. Many assumed Jesus’ mission would bring earthly power, but now they find themselves fear...

Leader: The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? People: The Lord is the strength of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid? Leader: One thing I have asked of the Lord, that I will se...

In their book Leadership on the Line, Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky describe adaptive challenges as the work confronting a leader when there is no known fix to a problem. It’s when “best practices” ...

St. Columba was an Irish monk and abbot, who is largely responsible for the evangelization of Scotland. He founded the monastery at Iona, which became a training ground and launching point for further...

We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

Leader: The Lord is our light and our salvation Whom should we fear? People: The Lord is our strength, What can make us afraid? Leader: We ask one thing of the Lord; to live in his house all the...

In the battle of life, it is not the critic who counts; nor the one who points out how the strong person stumbled, or where the doer of a deed could have done better. The credit belongs to the person ...

A blessing for the courage to try Blessed are you, faced with the impossible.  You who do not take your eyes away  from what threatens to swallow you whole.  You who stare down reality,  tho...

God of our life, there are days when the burdens we carry chafe our shoulders and weigh us down; when the road seems dreary and endless, the skies grey and threatening; when our lives have no music in...

I’d grown up in a Boston suburb where people’s homes were set behind deep hedges or protected by huge yards and neighbors hardly knew each other. And they didn’t need to: nothing ever happened in my t...

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond al...

Sometimes the circumstances at hand force us to be braver than we actually are, and so we knock on doors and ask for assistance. Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than w...

So you failed. All right you really failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You think I ...

I suspect that this is the most important thing I’ve said in all my interviews and talks as well as in this book. It’s a truth that applies to more than writing. It applies to anything that is importa...

Courage is putting one foot in front of the other when all you can see is a faint outline of the future.

Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to li...

Almost all heroic individuals face grave crises while they are still on the road to reaching the ultimate decision that they will remain faithful to their selves, whatever the cost.

Eternal God, lead me now out of the familiar setting of my doubts and fears, beyond my pride and my need to be secure into a strange and graceful ease with my true proportions and with yours; ...

When you start showing up, you learn that some of the most beautiful things only happened because you found the courage to exit your own head and just do the next necessary thing.

Though God is at work, God hides… You have a choice: see God here or not; see salvation, or see only human courage; see the divine subtly at work, or see chance, luck of the draw on this day of lots.

Ronald Rohlheiser tells a true story of a Jewish boy named Mordechai who could not be coaxed into going to school. When he turned six years old, his mother forced him to go, but the process was misera...

Pastor: Lord God, we thank You that You have taught us what You would have us believe and do. Help us by Your Holy Spirit, for the sake of Jesus Christ, to hold fast Your Word in our hearts.  You ha...

The things we say yes to and the things we say no to determine the terrain of our future. My convoluted journey is posted with invitations, and my RSVPs account for the twists and turns. Sometimes, ha...

Resilience is the virtue that enables people to move through hardship and become better. No one escapes pain, fear, and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffe...

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the ar...

Disturb us, Lord, when we are too pleased with ourselves; when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little; when we arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore. Disturb us, Lo...