the obstacle is the way

courage is not the absence of fear. courage requires fear. courage is acting or speaking in spite of fear. but fear is also a lie. when you confront fear, it doesn't just crumble or dissipate or whatever....it ceases to exist

but it's so convincing. and there's the irony that to really have courage means that you have believed the lie. 

only the hopeless situation provides scope for redemption 

i remember a while ago - sometime in the second half of last year (2019)....I had a really challenging year....and in the midst of the storm I was in, one day pinterest spoke to me. all of these positive messages appeared. there are these pins that are like a message from God, or just a message that something good is going to happen, and others that are like affirmations. 

So I got the idea that God was going to bless me. I actually remember thinking - tommorrow something spectacularly good is definitely going to happen (that's what pinterest told me). the next day was a Saturday and I was working at a tutoring college, and because I'm so obsessive about not being late, and also the tutoring college is quite a long trip away, I used to always arrive about an hour or more before I needed to be there and I would go to a coffee shop and have something to eat and a coffee

it was just a normal Saturday really. but that idea that God was going to bless me made me start thinking about what that would look like....what do I want? so I started to write things down. it was pretty inspiring. I continued to add to the list over the coming days, and I still have it. The things I wrote down were, I felt and told people that I shared some of the things with - they were basically outside the realms of possibility. but there was something coinpelling about the list. this was pre-covid, so if they were outside the realms of possibility then, they are even more so now.....

time went by and more Saturdays came and went/// like I said, this was a difficult and stressful time in my life. I remember thinking one Saturday, if only I could get past this, get over all this stress and the sense of crisis in which I was mired....if only I could do that, then maybe all of these goals I have, or some of them, could happen. 

and then it occurred to me that I was thinking about it the wrong way. what would prepare me to achieve my goals? would feeling more comfortable and secure - feeling the way I imagined I would feel if all of those things happened....would that bring those things about? no 

what occurred to me was that the pain and turmoil - the discomfort - I was going through was the necessary preparation. it was exactly the right preparation I needed. you become strong by going through things that require you to be strong. it wasn't exactly cathartic....like, I didn't suddenly feel better. I didn't feel like, oh, it all makes sense now. but it was a realisation that brought some meaning to the challenges I was going through.