A Quote by Brandon Mull

Hours of crisis often call for sacrifice. In matters of consequence, when have doubt and fear given the best advice? Why not heed faith, courage, and honor? — © Brandon Mull
Hours of crisis often call for sacrifice. In matters of consequence, when have doubt and fear given the best advice? Why not heed faith, courage, and honor?
The best is he who calls men to the best. And those who heed the call are also blessed. But worthless who call not, heed not, but rest.
Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it's alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren't opposites, they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.
There are many different kinds of doubt. When we doubt the future, we call it worry. When doubt other people we call is suspicion. When we doubt ourselves we call it inferiority. When we doubt God we call it unbelief. When we doubt what we hear on television we call it intelligence! When we doubt everything we call it cynicism or skepticism.
You call for faith: I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists. The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say, If faith o'ercomes doubt.
What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.
In those who rest on their unshakable faith, pharisaism and fanaticism are the unmistakable symptoms of doubt which has been repressed. Doubt is not overcome by repression but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible.
Joy is at its keenest when contrasted with sorrow, courage at its height when it follows fear, faith at its noblest when it grows from doubt.
For the sacrificed, in the hour of sacrifice, only one thing counts: faith-alone among enemies and skeptics. Faith, in spite of the humiliation which is both the necessary precondition and the consequence of faith, faith without any hope of compensation other than he can find in a faith which reality seems so thoroughly to refute.
But doubt is a crucial to faith as darkness is to light. Without one, the other has no context and is meaningless. Faith is, by definition, uncertainty. It is full of doubt, steeped in risk. It is about matters not of the known, but of the unknown.
Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.
In my experience, God rarely makes our fear disappear. Instead, He asks us to be strong and take courage. What is courage? As Ordinary discovered, courage is not the absence of fear; rather, it's choosing to act in spite of the fear. You could say that without fear, you can't have genuine courage.
The experience of the '90s, whether it's the '94 peso crisis or the '97 crisis in Asia, the '98 crisis, even the 2001 crisis, is that we recovered pretty readily. There wasn't great consequence.
The best way to battle fear is with courage. You have to look at the opposite of fear: Fear is scared of courage.
As soon as we ask what faith is and what sort of mistreatment of faith causes doubt, we are led to the first major misconception about doubt-the idea that doubt is always wrong because it is the opposite of faith and the same thing as unbelief. What this error leads to is a view of faith that is unrealistic and a view of doubt that is unfair.
No one wishes for crisis, but when crises come, they can call forth our best impulses, those of compassion, courage, creativity, and community. And if there are crimes and evils hidden in the dark places of our society and the darker places of our consciousnesses, all the better they come to the surface to be seen, understood, confronted, and healed. If our generation is called to bear a burden of that healing, it is a powerful calling and honor and one within our capability.
In a household of faith, there is no need to fear or doubt. Choose to live by faith and not fear.
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