PURPOSEFUL LIVING

“Fear not for I am with you, be not dismay for I am your God, I will uphold you, I will uplift you with My victorious right hand” - Psalms

“Courage is fear that has said its prayers.” -Karl Barth, Swiss Theologian

Courage isn’t an absence of fear. It is doing what you are afraid to do. It’s having the power to let go of the familiar and forge ahead into new territory.

Courage deals with principle, not perception. If you don’t have the ability to see when to stand up and the conviction to do it, you’ll never be an effective person, more so a leader.

Fear limits a person. But courage has the opposite effect. It opens door, and that’s one of the most wonderful benefits. British theologian John Henry Newman said, “Fear not that your life will come to an end but that it will never have a beginning.”

 Inspirational Quotes

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

“Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” — Helen Keller

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear.”–Mark Twain

“Anything is possible. You can be told that you have a 90-percent chance or a 50-percent chance or a 1-percent chance, but you have to believe, and you have to fight.” — Lance Armstrong

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” — Paulo Coelho

“…courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.” — Rollo May

Role Model

Lance Armstrong
By Elizabeth Edwards (mother to four and an author living with cancer)

“There is no one else quite like him. And there probably never will be. The best cyclist ever, Lance Armstrong won the sport’s premier event, the Tour de France, an almost incomprehensible seven times from 1999 to 2005. But before he could do that, in 1996 he had to beat back a cancer that was supposed to take his life. Testicular cancer had spread to his abdomen, lungs and brain. Grim-faced doctors told him he had no chance. But ‘no chance’ was not words that had meaning for Lance.

He spearheaded the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which made a yellow plastic loop a statement of resistance and strength across the entire planet. Like Lance himself, his foundation looks for the next horizon. It advocates for those living with cancer, funds research, inspires the cancer community to support each other and is collectively stronger than any one of us could be alone. Maybe team cycling taught him this, or maybe Lance, 36, is what you see.

Lance took a minor sport in America and turned it into a great national passion and a great national pride. And he did it by struggling for years, alone on a bike often in unforgiving weather, over terrain that most of us would view as hostile, when no one was watching, no one was cheering.

He inspired all of us who face a cancer diagnosis to search out the doctors who believe that we can live, to hold on to those friends and family who stand beside our bed-and then to fight to prove the faith of those friends and the beliefs of those doctors well founded. After Lance, no one of us could ever again say it was too hard, the odds stacked against us were too high, the fight already lost. The fight I fight is for me and my family, but the power to fight belongs in good measure to Lance.”

Final Note
So now, when faced with the challenges, exercise your courage …. It may feel awkward initially, but it’s within you and it will grow and become strong as you use it more. So be strong and of good courage!

Photo by Incredimazing