At the drop of 2020, like a bat out of hell (China), a pandemic came knocking at the door of every country in the world and since then we’ve been bombarded with reminders of imminent and cruel death. The reminder that today you could breathe your last, and so it could be with your loved ones, your neighbours and favourite postman. When this sort of information is coming from the top (world leaders), it tends to have lasting impact.
For some people, this is the first time their mortality has been brought into the light of day with frightening clarity. Fear gets deep under the skin, eroding all strength and courage to function – and so they hide away for long stretches of time under the illusion they are protecting themselves and others. This to me, has revealed a very telling thing:.
It’s not our freedom, health or our very lives we hold so dear – it’s our need for control.
When I had just moved to the UK, I put on a brave optimistic face, but underneath I was full of itchy concern if ANYTHING at all, would work out long term. I met up with a person for counsel and as we drank coffee inside the lobby of a hotel, he helped me (to this day) with this one sentiment:
With this now equipped to my tool belt, I was able to let go of my need for control and opt into the courage to live through whatever unknown I was walking into. I had a tough mind to face it, yet a soft heart to learn from a lesson or two.
Is it not time to admit our virtue muscles have atrophied? Is it not time to confront our fears of living a dangerously positive life? Good news, you can retrain what has weakened. You can make strong what was shrunk. You can find your courage, once again.
This week I wanted to cover what I think is so important in our quest to be more courageous. It’s mostly, actually, about focusing on others. How’s that? The difficulty of a personal transformation is factually that when focusing on simply being better people by willing it to existence, you get left with the silence of disappointment. Life does not work like that and often indirect approaches are the antidote to updating our value system.
Critical race theory or CRT for short, is an ideology (a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.) that seeks to place everybody into clear and yet not so clear categories, which a person can quickly identify if they are being discriminated against as an individual or a collective group within society. This ideology often promotes the idea that even the very fabric of an entire country is fundamentally flawed and racist, therefore organizations such as the court system, law enforcement, universities, public spaces, schools and your private home life, must be reeducated to make people, and yes kids at an extremely young age, aware of this rampant injustice.
While at church, Nariyah of her own accord picked up the Bible from my lap which was already opened at Genesis 1 and started piling through it, seeing which words she could read then flipping through the pages.
“Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes
Why do we love (and hate) these (sometimes predictable) storylines so much? What is so thrilling about watching the scenes of what we wish ourselves never to experience? Why are cliffhangers so important? Because we simply see ourselves, though perhaps, never quite manifested, in that chosen character. We desperately want to mimic them to become an ideal version of ourselves. It just might be that what we seek is to at least know that we are not alone.
Well today I wanted to talk about the flip side. When it’s time to wisely tell yourself to shut up and buy the thing.