Stories and reflections on faith and courage
New Choosing Courage in 2022 posts every first and third Sunday!
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Waiting for Your Ticket: The Courage of Corrie ten Boom
Despite the horrors they faced, Corrie and her sister Betsy held onto their faith, and Corrie learns that God gives her strength at exact moment when she needs—not before.
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Fear of Change
“And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5).
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Be Addicted to Growth
Overcoming fears is scary. But what if even “scary” didn’t bother us as much anymore?
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Baby Steps
Every success adds to my list of victories that I can cling to when I try something new. I remember what it feels like to pass the finish line, full of relief and confidence, and I know that I can do hard things.
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Fear and the Importance of “Getting Back on the Horse”
One of the most important lessons I learned in cognitive behavioral therapy was that avoidance increased fear. We may think that avoiding something we are afraid of will bring us comfort, and it may for a time, but it will eventually only make our fear worse.
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How to Have Courage Through Self-Doubt
We can either see self-doubt as our mind’s way of telling us we aren’t good enough; or we can see it as our mind’s way of telling us that we can get better.
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Remembering the Courage We Have in Christ
Everything that I could ask for, Christ has already done.
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How to Use Your Imagination for Hope Instead of Fear
I have come to believe that overcoming fear requires training our imaginations and letting them be redeemed.
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Breaking the Chain of Anxiety
If thoughts are powerful enough to affect our feelings, then that means they must be powerful enough to make us feel better, too.
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What I Wish I Had Known About Anxiety Sooner
The more of life we experience, the more confident we can be that we can handle these moments of discomfort. What used to trigger anxiety is now just an inconvenience.
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Announcement: Choosing Courage in 2022
One of the things I have learned about courage in the past several years is that it often has to be actively pursued. We have to want to change, and we have to make conscious efforts to do hard things. My hope is to spur you (and myself) into living courageously this year.
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Update: One Year Late(r)
I know I’m late in saying it, but I hope you all have had a wonderful start to this new year. It feels strange but comfortably familiar to be back here. As a guilt-driven person, I feel the need to apologize for my lateness, and yet I have a feeling I’m not the only one…
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Sunny Days are Behind Every Cloud
Today’s post is a little different because I’m still learning as I write this, working through the negative thoughts that have been nagging me lately.
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Worry Can Wait: How I Learned to Postpone Anxious Thoughts
When I was in counseling, my counselor told me that, sometimes, it’s best to set worries aside for awhile.
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If I Could Go Back in Time
I woke up last night from a dream where I was back in 2006 as a thirteen-year-old.
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Should We be Striving for Purpose?
What if our purpose isn’t about having purpose? What if it isn’t about what we do but who we are?
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How Peace Surpasses Understanding
When we take our anxieties to God, we are not just asking that God takes away our fear. We are remembering that there is a God who listens and who cares about every detail of our lives, and this alone washes away our fear.
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How to Know if You’re Dating the Right Person
As an over-thinker, it was difficult to let myself like anyone, date anyone, or even reject anyone without feeling like I could “mess up” God’s plan.
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How I Learned to Halt Physical Anxiety
Last night, I woke up with an anxious feeling in my stomach.
My breaths became shallow and quick, and I felt that familiar feeling of physical anxiety creeping up.
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How Suffering Produces Hope
2020 has been a reminder for many that the security systems we have trusted don’t hold up. Now that we are preparing to celebrate Christmas, let it be a reminder that God enters into our fear and brokenness.
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Finding Abundance Where I Am
We need less than we think, and there is abundance–and the possibility of abundance–all around us.
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Restore to Me the Joy of My Salvation
When you grow up in church hearing the same stories, they can become dull. Or when you have prayed to God many times without hearing a word or being filled with a feeling, you can begin to feel complacent.
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Fear of Change, Moving, and Being Rooted
Can I believe that the future will be even greater than the past? Can I believe that I haven’t yet experienced all there is?
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Practicing What I Believe #6: Embracing Hypocrisy
One day we’ll be able to perform perfectly, but for now we’re still in rehearsal.
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Fear and Faith Can Coexist
Sometimes I feel guilty about my fear. As a Christian, I have heard the declarations over fear and the claims that it is a sin. I’ve read all of the verses in scripture that say, “Do not fear.” I know that fear, like laziness or greed, is a vice. But is it opposed to faith?
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Where is Your Faith?: Directing Your Fear to the Only One Who is Worthy of it
Today I want to share a podcast interview that has been one of the best messages on fear I have ever heard. I hope it inspires you as much as it inspires me!
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You Can Do Anything for an Hour: Teaching with Anxiety
Doing hard things makes us stronger. The more I have been stretched, the bigger I can dream. I used to confine my dreams to my backyard, but now there is possibility. Because I know I can do anything for an hour.
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Not all tears are evil: Learning to cry again
When I’m done crying, I blink out the tears, wipe my eyes, and move on feeling stronger instead of weaker.
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Do You Want to Be Healed?
I believe the danger in identifying with a mental disorder is that we can begin to embrace our thoughts as though they were not disordered–as thought they were a healthy, normal part of us that don’t need to be challenged.
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Practicing What I Believe 5: Religion
In James, the “religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (1:27).
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When Fear is Love
What if being safe and listening the CDC guidelines is not an act of fear at all but an act of love?
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Practicing What I Believe 4: Morning Prayers
Sometimes we feel like the world is falling apart. Like the disciples panicking in the storm, we look at the waves and wind and wonder when the boat will sink.
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Practicing What I Believe 3: Waste
The problem is that waste is a part of our daily lives. We can’t go to a party or a restaurant without receiving plastics and styrofoams. This is an issue that is constantly creating cognitive dissonance in me.
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Practicing What I Believe 2: Meat
First… If you missed last week, I’m hoping to write a series on things that I have been trying to do to practice what I believe. I want to share these thoughts and ideas with you, not only to have a space to keep me accountable, but also to have a discussion about the best…
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Cognitive Dissonance, Despair, and Practicing What We Believe
Whenever we have a conviction and cannot or do not live by it, we create a mental distance between our beliefs and our actions–we are singing two notes that don’t go together. To protect ourselves, we mute the noise. As the distance grows, so does our guilt and despair.
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Gardening for Hope
The Creation story begins in a garden, where humanity is seen as caretakers, and I can’t help but think that, whenever we return to the garden, we reclaim some sense of our original purpose and feel more alive in doing so.
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Anticipation Over Worry
Christian anticipation does more than look ahead–it looks behind at what Jesus has already done to save us, once and for all. Anything we could ever ask for has already been done, so we know our hopes will be fulfilled.
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Enjoying the Holidays Again: Overcoming Expectations Anxiety
Expectations say that the day must be perfect. Any hint of anxiety is a failure that will ruin the day–and your memories of that day, and your expectations for that day next year–forever. Not eating, escaping to be alone, or missing out on any family tradition is devastating.
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You Already Know What You Need to Know
If we have been on this earth long enough, we have already heard or read many of the things we have needed to know, especially if we are actively seeking wisdom for certain areas of our lives. Yet we still keep seeking, and even when we take in advice, we don’t always follow through with it.
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The Benefits of Stooping Down
I wanted to stoop down in the grass and imagine that that–the green and the soil and the sky–were all I needed to survive. Like a bird, I could live above the world that made me anxious.
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Changing Words to Change My Thoughts
Can we change the way we perceive things by changing the language and images we use to think about them?
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Seasons Repeat, But You Don’t Have To
Every fall is like this.
On the first day, I step outside, and everything is different. The air is cooler, slightly. There’s a rich, nose-tingling scent of dried leaves.
Christians, Can We Talk about Sex?
When we talk about sex as bad, we more deeply ingrain the idea that it is objectifying and vulgar, and we associate it with only shame. When we describe it only as sacred and private, we gloss the idol in gold, as if it were the communion bread that was sacred and not the remembrance.
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Finding Confidence by Embracing God’s Power
Self-doubt turns me inward and tells me I’ll never be good enough. But the Bible is full of stories of helplessly broken people who were used for God’s glory, not because of their confidence or abilities, but because of God’s power within them.
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Why I Take Anti-Depressants
Because of the boost of medication, I have been able to try new things that I might not have tried before, like taking long hikes, kayaking, visiting friends, and more things that I love.
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The Danger of Empathy
Empathy deepens relationships, fuels understanding, inspires reconciliation, unites us in our differences, and pushes us to act in love.
But it is also dangerous.
Obsessed with Happy
How often has our obsession with happiness gotten in the way of something better?
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When the News is Depressing
When I found out about the rainforest, the first thing I did was think about it long enough that I felt a hint of something. Then I researched it, found out facts, and then scrambled to find something–anything–that I could do. But what can I do about something far away that only the rich and powerful can influence?
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Leaning on the Faith and Hope of Others
We are not made to find all of the answers in our own individual experiences. When we share stories, we pile hope into an already vast collection of shared hopes and triumphs–stories of faith and overcoming despite all of the reasons to despair.
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Subscribe by Email for More!
Right now, email subscribers receive a free PDF of a brief nonfiction piece that I wrote in graduate school about an experience I had with debilitating anxiety. I wrote it to process this time, and it became something I hope will encourage others.
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An Anxious Student’s Guide to College
You are not alone, and many like yourself have completed the journey you are just beginning who are ready to tell you that you can do it.
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“You need to eat more” and other things not to say to someone who is underweight
Ever since I was a kid, I have had people tell me to eat more, to get “some meat on those bones,” or that I was “skinny,” “bony,” or just “skin and bones.”
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Skinny: How Anxiety Can Affect Weight, and How I Regained 10 Pounds in a Year
For a few months, I couldn’t step onto a scale without having a mild panic attack.
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Prayers of Affirmation
Today, I want to challenge you–and myself–to pray a little differently.
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Doubting to Understand
Love is hard, especially love that brings doubt. But sometimes that doubt is a pathway to more love.
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Trusting Amidst Disappointment
“though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.”
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Wonderful Christian Music You Won’t Hear on the Radio
It’s difficult at times to find Christian music with both good lyrics and a style that I like. I know I’m not the only one. I love Casting Crowns, Tenth Avenue North, and Lauren Daigle as much as any K-Love listener, but I sometimes want music that is more contemporary, folksy, ambient, or soothing. It’s taken awhile to build this list,…
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Remember to Remember
I had forgotten how God had said I was loved and looked after. I had forgotten how God had brought me to the alter to say “I do” to my husband and then to the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado Springs where my breaths were short but I spoke a “thank you” prayer to my Savior.
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Lies I Believed About Christian Dating
If we only tell people that something is bad when it really depends on timing and circumstances, we only cripple them when suddenly that things is not “bad” anymore.
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Out of Petals: Letting Go of Infatuation
When we want things to happen now, we miss out on so much of the present blessings in our lives.
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Our Story: How God Helped Me Say YES
God is faithful and knows our hearts. He knows our self-doubts, our fears, and our hold-ups. God knows how our minds can mess us up over and over. But God never gives up.
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The Waiting Season
If I took a pocket knife and cut through branches, I would see the cambium—green veins still carrying life.
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Get Your Hopes Up: Daring to be Positive
If you are a worst-case-scenario person, you don’t have to be.
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Travel Anxiety: How I Learned to Prepare for Life’s Anxieties without Shame
Sometimes equipping yourself can seem like you’re giving in to your fears, but in reality you are using your fear in your favor, molding it into something helpful instead of harmful.
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The Introvert Excuse (and why we need each other)
The truth is that we are useless on our own, and our lives mean nothing if they are spent rooted in place, growing taller without spreading out and sharing life.
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Choosing Joy
I think we sometimes try to make others feel guilty for their joy. When we don’t see joy in our own lives, we begin talking down the joy others are experiencing.
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Flipping a Coin: When God Doesn’t Tell You What to Do
What if God’s promise is not to be a road map but a travel companion?
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What I Learned from Overcoming a Season of Depression
What are practical things you can do to overcome depression and anxiety? I hope my experience helps you.
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“I Can Do All Things”: A Contextualized Word of Encouragement
Paul isn’t writing this to the Philippians to tell them that they can do anything they ever dreamed of because Christ gives them strength. Paul is telling them that no matter what happens—when things are good and when things are bad—they can find contentment in the comfort of Christ.
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The Beginning and the End: Enjoying the Journey with Jesus
I’m realizing that maybe it’s not about what comes out of the oven in the end. Maybe it’s really about the process of mixing together a beautiful life with the one who created it in the first place.
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True Humility
Christ, who was perfect, did not flaunt his perfection or consider it his right to stand over others, but humbled himself, becoming a servant.
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New Beginnings Don’t Have to Wait for the New Year
New beginnings, essentially, are hours, minutes, and seconds away from us, and all we have to do is move into them.
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When the Fear Does Not Subside
Don’t let fear have the last word. Because sometimes fear does not subside. Sometimes…you must do it afraid.
Keep readingLittle Did She Know: An Introduction
I first knew I wanted to be a writer when I was nine. I dreamed of writing novels and sharing stories that would inspire people the way stories inspired me. I spent more hours writing on my desktop computer than I did doing anything else. This produced a 100 page fantasy novel that I am…
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Emily Brooks 