30 Days of Character Development - Courage

Well, I'm back, and the whole jury thing was actually a great experience except that after 5 hours of listening to the lawyers arguments and coming up with my conclusion I was told that I was the alternate juror and could leave. I was devastated! I had invested 2 days of my life into this process and they didn't let me finish it! Oh Well, I guess there is some lesson in there somewhere but I haven't figured it out yet.

So on to our topic of Courage. Well, if we are going to work on building courage in our life we must first look at the opposite - which is fear. Fear is a terrible thing because it will stop us in so many ways - it hinders our creativity, our productivity and even our relationships. It can cause health problems both physically and mentally. Fear also has some companions and they are worry, anxiety and lying.

Let's take a look at each one and the effect it has on us. Today we will just focus on worry because this is a BIG one.

The definition of worry is to torment oneself with or suffer from disturbing thoughts; fret.

Worry creates what I can "circle thinking" it is a thinking process that goes around the same fear circle again and again with no resolution. For example you worry about a future event, all the things that could happen, magnify anything you have ever heard or experienced about this event in a negative way and imagine the worse case scenario, when you get to the conclusion you start all over again.

The French philosopher Mantaigne said, "My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened." Corrie ten Boom wrote, " Worry does not empty tomorrow of sorrows, it empties today of strength."

We talked about how Beth Moore handed worry in our last post but here is another tool to help you if you struggle in the area, as we all do.

The next time you are worry about an event in the future, ask yourself these 4 questions:

1. What event am I worrying about?
2. What's the worst that could happen? If the worst happened they what would happen?
3 What are the chances, according to the law of average, that what I'm worried about will ever occur (do a google search :)
4. What can I do about it?

Another way to do this is:
Take an event that you were very worried about and right down all the things that you were worried were going to happen - then write down what actually happened - keep a log of this and over time you will see the things we worry about almost never happen.

"Do do not worry about tomorrow, it will have enough worries of its own. There is no need to add to the troubles each day brings." Matthew 6:34