If we take an honest look at our hearts, I think we would find that fear can be one of the strongest influences on some of the decisions that we have made in our lives. Fear can paralyze us at times, keeping us silent when we know we should speak, and holding us back from the very life that God is calling us to live. We fear losing control, we fear rejection, we fear failure, we fear the unknown. Those things are just part of being human. But our readings today remind us of an essential truth: God has not called us to live in fear; He has called us to live with faith.

In that same vein, living with faith doesn’t mean we won’t ever be afraid. Faith means we have the courage to keep moving even when we’re facing a moment of fear. Courage is not the absence of fear, it’s the refusal to let fear dictate how we live. The smallest seed of trust in God is greater than the greatest fear that we’re faced with.

What keeps us from living with that kind of faith is often a desire for control. We want the answers; we want the guarantee that everything is going to work out; we want certainty before we take a step forward; we want to control the outcome. But walking with the Lord rarely works that way. He asks us to trust Him enough to take the next step, even when the path forward isn’t all that clear. He asks us to believe that His way is better than ours, to believe that He walks beside us no matter what life throws at us. It’s in the moments when we act with courage, when we serve with passion, when we love with boldness that faith comes alive in its fullness.

If we look at the lives of the saints, we see that so many of them lived with enormous uncertainty and risk. Many of them knew their belief in Jesus and sharing the Gospel was something that would cost them. And yet, despite that, they persevered. What made the saints holy wasn’t that they never felt afraid, but that they chose to trust God more than their fears. That’s why they could forgive when it seemed impossible, why they could love when it wasn’t returned, and why they could even suffer for the sake of Christ without losing hope.

That same choice stands before us every day. I think all of us can name an area in our life where fear is holding us back. We might be afraid to have a difficult conversation with a loved one and so we avoid it. We might know that we need to take a step in faith, but we’re too afraid because we don’t know what’s on the other side. We might be pushing off a decision to change because we’re comfortable with something we know we can control. All of us have something.

This week, take some time to reflect and identify what that is. Bring it to prayer. Bring it to the Lord. Ask the Holy Spirit to show us where we are living in fear, to remove that fear from our hearts, and to give us the grace to trust that the Lord has a plan for our lives. That’s how we move forward. That’s how we live with courageous faith.

This weekend, the Church celebrates Respect Life Sunday. We are at a pivotal moment in history; we see how our world has completely lost its way. As people of faith, we can see that. We can see that we’re in a battle of good vs. evil. Because of that, the Lord needs us to not be afraid, He needs us to have courageous faith, to be bold in living the Gospel so that we can call the world to conversion. Fear is at the heart of so many attacks on human life, whether that be through abortion, euthanasia, neglect of the poor, violence in our communities. Fear of suffering, fear of responsibility, fear of the unknown future. Fear says to the young woman experiencing an unexpected pregnancy: “This child will ruin my plans.” Fear says to the person battling a debilitating illness: “This illness is too heavy to carry.” Fear says to those who neglect the poor: “This person is not worth loving.”

But faith says something different. Faith says that every human life is a gift, no matter how fragile, unexpected, or inconvenient. Faith says that God has a purpose for every person, from the tiniest child in the womb to the elderly man or woman in a nursing home. Faith says that love is stronger than fear.

We are called to be people of life…and that takes tremendous courage. It means being willing to walk with women in crisis pregnancies instead of leaving them to carry the burden alone. It means standing by the sick and the elderly, even when it’s messy and inconvenient. It means seeing the poor, the immigrant, the prisoner, and the marginalized not as problems to be solved or issues to be dealt with, but as people to be loved.

And this is where we discover those small seeds of faith in our own lives. Every time we make a choice for life, we are planting seeds of faith that can grow into something far greater than we can ever imagine.

God has not given us a spirit of cowardice; He’s given us a spirit of power, of love, of self-control. That’s the spirit we need to live boldly as people of life, not just in the words we speak, but in the actions of mercy and love we offer. If we hold on to that truth, if we let those little seeds of faith grow, we will discover the strength to defend life, to cherish life, and to live courageously in the freedom of God’s love.

Image: Courage, Michael Dziedzic. Used under Unsplash license.