We Are Cowards – A Challenge To Examine Our Worldviews

Division has become so severe that the only area of remaining agreement is that the division exists. This is a monumental time to be alive. Everything is drenched in poison. It takes a heroic effort simply to face a day. We can choose to turn away and ignore everything that disturbs us. Most do. Then again most people are cowards.

Then again I am a coward in my natural state.

We are cowards.

I am part of an untested generation that has not known true hardship. We screech about privilege unwilling to examine the extent of our own. We act without thinking in part because we don’t know how to think. We have been taught what to do, and we cannot imagine that another possibility exists.

We’re too cowardly to even ask the right questions.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did we come from? What gives life meaning? What happens when we die?

We shrug. Who cares? What does that have to do with me?

Everything.

Begin at the beginning.

If you can’t examine or articulate your own worldview then you are living as a mere animal or machine subject only to instinct and programming. If you refuse to ponder the primary questions then you are already captive. We are on shifting sands, and if you can’t see that then it’s impressive that you’re still here reading this.

So what? What does any of this matter? What’s the point?

If the fact that we are in a life and death struggle that has eternal consequences doesn’t rouse us, then perhaps our eyes will only open in the seconds before we are directly confronted with a situation that we have absolutely no answer for.

Now is the time for each of us to ask and to determine what our ultimate is. What is our highest priority that we would sacrifice everything else for? What is our one true need in the midst of endless wants. What is nonnegotiable for us?

Wealth? Leisure? Career? Technology? Status? Romance? Freedom? Patriotism? Fame? Praise? Comfort? Family? Children? Our very lives?

God?

If we don’t get this one right, then we may find all removed. If we won’t even look, ask, seek, or consider…

God help us.

We don’t have the courage to stand in our own strength. But if those who know God cry out. If we enter a renaissance of repentance. If the Holy Spirit is poured out once more.

If…

If-

If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling