Brave

Have you ever felt like you allow fear to take over your life? Sorry, too heavy? Let me start over. Good morning! Beautiful day, isn't it? There. Now stop avoiding the question. Last week I finished a book called Let's All Be Brave by Annie F. Downs.  Y'all, it was incredible.  The premise of the book is simply an encouragement to stop living in fear and just step out in faith and do something brave. It doesn't even have to be anything huge, just something that you would normally look at and think, "Someday I'd like to try that" or even, "I could never do something like that". As I was reading, I started thinking back on all the times I didn't allow myself to do something out of fear of failing.  My family took a lot of vacations when I was little.  We would load up our RV and hit the road. My sister and I usually loved it. We would get to the RV park and see all the other kids that got dragged taken on vacation with their families and immediately hope to make some friends. Being the protective, older sister that I was, I'd send Kerry to scope out the prospects. Meaning, I would send her on a mission to approach kids at their campsites or the playground and say something like, "Hey! We have marshmallows at our trailer. Wanna be friends?" while I looked on anxiously from afar.  However, I feel like what often got said was more along the lines of, "My sister wants to know if you wanna be her friend," making the scene of me gawking in the distance even more weird.  The point is, I sent her to do the work because she was/is fearless.  She can be friends with anyone.  Even back then, if she got rejected, she would just shrug and move on to the next marshmallow-loving kid that wasn't creeped out by the chubby girl back at the trailer holding said marshmallows.  For me, the idea of approaching anyone and asking to be friends (especially without marshmallows) was out of the question. Even still, it is very rare that you will see me approaching anyone just to make conversation.  Maybe that comes off as rude, but really it's fear of rejection and failure.  Failure to look cool. Failure to be funny. Failure to make them want to talk to me ever again. Well let me tell you..reading this book really struck something in me.  I'm tired of living in fear. I decided to take the author up on her challenge to do one brave thing. So, I signed up for a half marathon! Insane? Maybe. Brave? I definitely think so.  Maybe this won't cure my fear of rejection from people, but it will definitely be a step towards conquering my fear of failure in general.  I'm excited to start training.  I'll also post updates of my training progress to have some accountability. Here's to 2015, and here's to being brave.