Take Courage.

Our dreams determine our direction.

Be strong and let your heart take courage, all you who hope in the Lord.
Psalm 31:24 NASB

Take courage – An instagram friend mailed me a rock with courage on one side and Deuteronomy 31:6 on the other a week before Nikki, Grace, Etta and I moved back home to Kansas City, MO. My youngest and oldest grown daughters and Etta, Nikki’s dasughter/my granddaughter)
For those who don’t know.

These two photos are archived on my Instagram.
They were taken on May 1, 2019.
I carried my courage rock in my car for over a year.
Then I put it inside one of my keepsake boxes.
Containers that hold rocks, Jacob’s Well water, Mt Arbel rocks and five rocks from the valley David killed Goliath.

And I forgot about it.

Then, last week when I was packing up my room at the house Nikki and I shared, I looked on the floor, in the hallway, and there was my courage rock.

What the heck!
Instantly I sensed it was God delighting in my finding it in this way.
Shocked, I picked it up, tears falling…

God sees.
I felt like Gideon in that moment.
I felt Papa’s wink that I’m learning to trust myself.

I felt Papa’s “keep couraging"!”
I felt Yeshua’s “take heart, daughter!”

The hidden things.
I picked it up and put it in my car where it was four years earlier.
Almost to the date.
I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Courage.
Take courage David wrote.
From reading Davids stories we can see he doesn’t have a platonic faith.
A faith that is spiritual only.
He doesn’t just think “take courage”
Davids acts and acts often.

One of the best sermons I’ve heard on hope and courage really is Kristi Mac.
You can watch here.
It encouraged me and I know it will you too.

Rahab didn’t just think faith.
Like I believe in the father, in the son and in the holy spirit
Rahab took hope in her hands and faithed.
Rahab couraged.

Over the last four years I sometimes feel I’m being trained in courage and hope. Out of my head and into my body faith.

If you’ve taken any of Kristi’s “feasts” you will have discovered faith is a verb. It’s dynamic verses static.

I’m discovering we have so much power to create with God a new story.
We are not puppets.
We are encouraged to live life here and now and live it abundantly!

As I read and reread Bible stories, and these days I’m focusing more on stories of women in the Bible - faith seems to be more about perseverance.

It seems to be “couraging on” when couraging on feels impossible.

In the end, the kind of faith found in biblical characters is not the proclamation of doctrines or creeds or membership or attendance or tithing.

Maybe it is just sticking with it despite everything else.

That might be why David’s last though is encouragement.

And Yeshua/Jesus (Yeshua is Jesus’s real name)

Take heart, Daughters.
Fill in the blank with your name today.

Take heart, __________.

Keep going!

The Hebrew verb is āmēṣ

Did you know courage is a verb?
Just like faith.

I’m not smart enough to do anything other than regurgitate about the stems of the Hebrew words. There are three - Piel, Hiphil and Hithpael.

make firm. stregthen. secure. harden ones mind. exhibit strength. feel strong. stregthen oneself. persist in. prove superior. make oneself alert are some of the pictures of each “stem”.

I recently discovered Roderick Logan.

I pulled this quote below of his because it moved my heart.

This is what the living God did/doing with me when he found me twenty five years ago.

I sit on Papa’s lap, my safe place, and Papa dreamed with me.
Papa dreams with me still today.

Somehow, I feel now I’m ready to courage into the invisible and faith a beginning. A beginning that is unfamiliar, uncertain yet full of aliveness.

I can’t stop thinking “love is made in the dark”

And I can’t stop being curious about the living God making our hearts of stone alive!

What does being truly alive and experiencing abundant life right here right now look and feel like?

I feel they paint a bigger picture for us talking about courage rocks.

To be counted among those who walk in the ways of the LORD is to know that life and labor is a journey.

It was for Abraham and Sarah.
It was for Moses and Miriam.
So, it is for you and I, collectively and individually.

Thus, our response to culture must begin with self-awareness and self-regulation.

We cannot lead or influence culture to move in a direction that we ourselves are not already moving towards.

In other words, we must determine on the outset where are we going; never losing sight, never forgetting, and never giving up.

This is an eternal biblical principle, founded in the deepest wells of our salvation:

Leaving is easy, arriving is hard.

This is why, when parents ask me for advice about how to connect with a child suffering from attachment trauma, I tell them to sit with their child and dream.  

Dream with your child about what he/she would like to do, would like to become, places to go, things to see, and what they most like to achieve.

I have suggested to parents and children alike that they dream about their family’s history and imagine what you would want written about your part of the story. In your imagination, what difference would you would like to make in the world?

I found a quote by William Butler Yeats, a renowned Irish poet of the 19th and 20th centuries wrote,

“In dreams begin responsibilities.”

It seems, Yeats is suggesting that by dreaming one comes to feel a sense of ownership of their part of the story and thereby accepting the weight of responsibility.

Here is what we know.

Trauma replaces dreams with nightmares and replaces imagination with mitigation.

Without an imagination there is no hope.

Without a dream there is no reason for faith.

Our response to culture must include sharing our dreams and our imaginations with the world around us, and then maybe we will discover that we have shared destinies.

We must be open to thinking and talking about the future together.
Our dreams determine our direction.

I feel what Logan says (and lives) is true.

David seems to have been a dreamer—a big dreamer. 
And Rahab.

Maybe we need to be one too.

shalom in all things,
t, (harriet)