Washington Irving once introduced Charles Dickens at a dinner given in the latter's honor. In the middle of his speech Irving hesitated, became embarrassed, and sat down awkwardly. Turning to a friend beside him he remarked, There, I told you I would fail, and I did. If you believe you will fail, there is no hope for you. You will.

Life is filled with terrifying moments, and we cannot stop the onslaught of fear any more than we can hold back the wind. But we can always choose our response. The very winds that cause the eagle to soar later in life terrified it when it was an eaglet. Allow fear to drive you toward God.

First and foremost, we are not to be afraid. We are to banish every aspect of fear from our minds and not allow it to muddy our thinking.

Though she never moved, she was more alive than I. In the light of her beauty and strength, I realized what I had lost. Because of fear, I had forfeited strength, life, and beauty. I had lost a sense of my true self, and with that loss so much of what God wanted for me was yet unrealized.

But don't imagine that always brave translates to never afraid.

There is one grand lie - that we are limited. The only limits we have are the limits we believe.

spiritual exercises whereby to conquer oneself, and order one's life, without being influenced in one's decision by any inordinate affection.

What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.

Fear is not life-giving enough to sustain itself. We can move in the direction of fear only so long before it brings us to our knees, or to our end.

Truly, spiritual courage is on the endangered character-quality list.

Terrible as is war, it yet displays the spiritual grandeur of man daring to defy his mightiest hereditary enemy--death.

The fate of the world rests on this one thing: our capacity to actualize our spiritual potential, and quickly.