As we approach Easter, I find that I have come to the fourth and final crucial C that we need to develop within ourselves to equip ourselves adequately for the human endeavor: courage. Without planning it, I find new links between my parenting course teaching about courage and the Easter holiday itself.
To parents we teach the need to make our children brave as a means of giving them coping skills. Life doesn’t ever go according to human plans and even children need to know that they can adapt to change and the unexpected. While parents readily understand this concept, it’s another matter for them to implement it. Our natural tendency is to protect our children from pain and disappointment. It’s hard as a parent to allow a child to suffer hardship, especially when it’s within our power to ease or eliminate it. Yet, if we don’t judiciously train our kids to cope with stress and actively instruct them in problem solving we fail to prepare them for the inevitable storms of life.
Some of our struggle results from our own confused thinking. Do we sometimes suspect that courage is something that heroes have and ordinary people don’t? We can see that it is nice to have fortitude, but somehow don’t recognize that it is something we can acquire.
God gives us countless examples of how He aids our development of courage in the various characters of the Bible. Always, when God is giving people challenging things to do, He buoys up their self-confidence by promising to be beside them through whatever ordeal they might have to endure. Moses doesn’t want to confront Pharaoh, Esther can’t imagine how she could overturn her husband’s edict to massacre the Jews, and Peter can’t bear to hear Jesus predict His own death. But God never exempts us from the occasions when courage is called for; instead, He stands with us, enabling us to face the challenges of life.
In no case is this clearer than in the story of Jesus’ passion. The gospels tell us that Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, accepting the hosannas of the crowds all the while knowing that betrayal and a horrific death awaited Him. In the Garden of Gethsemane He prayed in anguish, asking the Father to remove “this cup,” making it plain for all of us that He knows what we face when we have to do something we dread. Here He also modeled for us how to cope in such circumstances. Note how honestly He prayed to the Father: “Everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me,” making no attempt to deny the torture He was experiencing. But alongside that poignant intimacy we can hear the resolve that faith converts to courage: “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:37 NIV).
As we prepare to celebrate the holiday that defines our identity as Christians, let us remember it as God’s demonstration for our benefit on the importance of courage and why it is an essential component of our humanity.
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