Yes, you can do Courage too

Photo by Linus Sandvide on Unsplash

“Mr Wickham,” a year five student asked recently, “isn’t it true that you can’t be brave without first being fearful?” Wow. I had never been asked that question before.

The question itself begged an answer of the rhetorical kind.

Well, of course, we know that in times of fear we need courage, but we hardly think of bravery sitting alongside fear; that in being brave we comprise fear. We desire our bravery to be more charismatic than that. We hardly want it cloistered in something so unfashionably ‘pathetic’ as fear.

If we accept our reality when we’re fearful,
but we don’t leave it there,
courage is how we may decide to respond,
and it leads us to take action.

This truth is greatly encouraging in a world that inflicts anxiety on just about every human being.

Whether it is the rough-and-tumble and hustle and bustle of life, scrambling just to keep up, or it is the trauma we are faced with, or the situations in our stories we cannot make any sense of, the weight of overwhelming concern for our world, conflict always in close proximity, or for other myriad valid reasons, we’re afflicted with this driving force of fear.

There is no sense in denying it. But there is absolute sense in embracing the narrative of fear in our stories, so much so that we inevitably come face-to-face with the choice to be brave or not.

Courage wrestles with realities
too problematic to leave as they are.

Courage, convicted to act,
sidles up to fear,
and it’s in all of us to act.

Suddenly, at some point, we find that we do have what it takes to wrestle with the realities we, in our life alone, are faced with. For a long time, we did not believe this. But now we do. We have seen the truth.

We can no longer deny that our strength comes
in being real about our weaknesses.

We have come to believe that fear is merely an activator for courage. We could not be courageous otherwise. There would be no need nor driving motivation.

Having accepted that we were fearful, we came to the precipice, and an answer to the age-old question of life was asked of us: will we fly, or will we fight?

Only then we looked behind us and saw the litany of flight that chequered our past. We could have been ashamed. But from that vantage point there is no reason to camp in disappointment or guilt. Opportunity was at our door. We decided that our past was telling us a story that up until now seemed meaningless. Added to the narrative, now, is the missing link of courage borne of faith, because now we accept the meaning of life, which is to press forward and make our lives count for everything that God intended of them and has intended for us.

We decided that the risk of courage was worth it, and we began to disregard the cost. We saw the enormous impact our courage could make, not only in our own lives, but especially to the lives reliant on ours. We came to believe in the urgency of legacy.

We came to believe in the reward beyond sacrifice;
that if we pressed past our fear into courage,
it would end better than it would have.

There is so much to fight for in this life, in fighting the good fight of faith. There are no casualties from this kind of fighting, because courage fights for love.

Courage fights believing in redemption. It believes that all things can be made new. It is willing to be creative and innovative, and to do the unexpected and the uncalculated, and especially to act on the leading of God, which is a faith discerned to do virtuous acts without thought of personal cost for the greater good of all.