Teaching children to be courageous

Pastor Jimmy Bartz explains the importance of teaching our children to be courageous
Parenting and Family Advice | Teaching children about courage
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Teaching children to be courageous

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Why would you teach courage to a child? You teach courage to a child because courage is the gateway to the virtuous or the spiritual life. It's the entrance. It's the cornerstone on which all spirituality or moral foundation sits. Maya Angelou says love might be that which pushes and urges the love in the vein, but you have to have courage to love someone. We help our children face their fear in order to push them toward every other virtue that exists, whether it's helping them be more compassionate. You have to face your fear in order to put yourself out there and be compassionate. I see it all the time when we're engaging in social service work and we bring kids into our program. It's scary to face uncertainty or anything that's unknown or people who are different than us. And so we slowly encourage them to engage what they're afraid of in a constructed, relatively controlled environment. Because we know that courage is not just the gateway to the virtuous life, but courage is the gateway to creativity and innovation. I like to say, Fear and Hope got together and had a baby. Her name was Courage. Courage bore two children: Creativity and Innovation. That's the sort of genealogy or blood line of how this gets developed in the bloodlines of our children.

Pastor Jimmy Bartz explains the importance of teaching our children to be courageous

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Jimmy Bartz

Priest

Jimmy serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Prior to coming to Jackson, he was the founder and priest at Thad’s, an emergent Episcopal Church in the Santa Monica, California, in the Diocese of Los Angeles. He has also served as the Campus Missioner at the University of Texas in Austin, at All Saints’ in Austin, Texas, and All Saints’ Parish in Beverly Hills, California. He is a graduate the University of Texas at Austin and Virginia Theological Seminary. Presently, he serves as the Chair of the Board of the Episcopal Evangelism Society, and in years past has worked with Red Bull High Performance teaching athletes spiritual disciplines, with Naval Special Warfare working to create systems for character development within special operations teams, and was a speaker at TEDx, Venice Beach.
Married to Cindy and dad to Jas and Jade, the Bartz family loves to spend time outside mountaineering, skiing, fly-fishing, hunting and surfing.  Jimmy is currently writing a book on the spirituality of risk.

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