When we’re talking about courage the subject of fear so often comes up, and often as some kind of opposing emotion to courage – as if we cannot be both at once. 

I think there’s a vision of courage that we bring from childhood into adulthood that isn’t terribly helpful – the childhood view of adults who seem endlessly competent and able to deal with every situation – that we find, when we are ourselves adults, to look terribly different from who we find ourselves to be. 

That has been one of the most interesting realizations of motherhood for me. As a child I have such vivid memories of how endlessly self-assured my parents seemed. I trusted them implicitly and it was as if there was absolutely no situation that arose in the first decade of my life that they were not completely equal to. 

College students seem much the same to me as well, since I had the privilege of growing up more or less on campus at Purdue University, where I came to know and love so many wonderful young women who were my earliest role models. They seem to know everything that they could need to know – how to dress, how to do their make up, how to get into an excellent school like Purdue. 

I lived in anticipation of the day that I would become like them, or become like my mother, and just know what to do all the time. Imagine my deep disappointment when I reached college myself only to discover that I still felt like I was still about 6 1/2. I had no idea what the heck I was doing and soon realized that no one else did either. And yet when I interacted with children I saw that same adoration that I had had myself. I came to realize for the first time that I was no different than the college girls I had adored as a child, and we were all of us just figuring it out as we went along. 

Talking to my mom about motherhood since having my own children I’m coming to see how many times she was doing the exact same thing I do on a daily basis – completely making it up as I go along.

As we grow we began to see the separation between our childhood view of things and the way things really are, but I don’t know if everyone’s viewpoint of courage grows in quite the same way. I think that our childhood ideal of courage is one of those things that kind of stubbornly sticks around, setting up very high bars for ourselves in terms of what we should feel prior to being brave. 

Sure, we intellectually embrace the idea that you can be both afraid and courageous and throw around terms like “do it scared“ and “live bravely“, but that’s one of those things where I feel like there is a gap between what we say and what we feel to be true.

So what’s to be done about this? 

I feel like my experience of motherhood gives me an insight into this. The day I brought my first child home from the hospital I was more overwhelmed and terrified than I have ever been on any other day in my entire life. But there was no escaping it. I was a mom now I needed to figure out how to be one. It was a part of my identity that was not going to change, but I need to figure out how to grow into it. 

And so it took doing mom things, day after day, our after hour, year after year, to begin to shape myself into the mother that I already was. 

I think it’s the same thing with courage. If being courageous is something that only happens incredibly rarely in our lives, if ever, I think we’re going to really struggle to let go of that youthful vision of what it should feel like to be courageous. 

But, on the other hand, if we create opportunities for courage on a regular basis, then we can become more and more the courageous person we were created to be – the courageous person God already placed inside us.

What does it mean to live a courageous life? 

I think the minutiae depends on who you ask. It might look different to a soldier, a septuagenarian, a mother, and a child. But I think you would find commonalities in everything that they say, namely that courage lies in subjecting yourself to something larger than yourself for a better good then simply your own momentary comfort. 

Perhaps the soldier would tell stories of the battlefield facing fears that are hard to comprehend and brothers and sisters in arms laying down their lives for those they serve with. 

An old woman might speak about maintaining a marriage in the face of Alzheimer’s, memory loss, or dementia, continuing to care for a person who no longer remembers you. 

A mother might talk about setting unpopular boundaries with her kids and going through all the effort and work to maintain those boundaries despite how uncomfortable it is for her personally to do so, and all the times her kids remind her that other kids parents don’t have the same standards. 

And I think if you asked my five-year-old he would tell you that courage is protecting his little siblings from anyone that might harm them, putting their health and safety before his own, although perhaps not quite in those words.

There is a nobility in the courage that is our birthright as Christians, daughters and sons of a Messiah who truly was a warrior king but not in the way that anyone expected. Christ went into battle for us, battle against not simply the Romans, which would’ve been quite popular with Jews at his time, but with death itself. 

The harder, better road. 

We are baptized into the family of that warrior king and find ourselves deputized under his same mantle – not the mantle of worldly glory, but the mantle of the better, harder road. 

The mantle of servant hood. 

The mantle of self forgetfulness. 

The mantle of humility. 

The mantle of courage. 

This is our birthright. 

This is who we are. 

We are fighters on our knees, not seeking the glory of the arena, but the good of our sister who cannot fight for herself. 

We could not fight her own battle against death, so Jesus fought for us. 

And so in his stead we find ourselves called to fight the battles that we are able for those who are not – the marginalized, the unborn, the forgotten, and the helpless. This is one of the most powerful ways that we imitate our king and follower commander. 

This is how we are brave. 

This is how we serve.

I’d love to hear your stories about how YOU are brave right where you are. Just comment and let me know. I love to read your stories and learn how I can better pray for you.

We talked last week about the wounds from human relationships that can make it hard to hope in God.

This week I want to talk about the radical bravery, the audacity, that it takes to hope in God. 

Something that so many in our culture would view as weakness, is actually an incredible sign of strength. Being able to embrace hope in Christ when all seems to be darkness is one of the most courageous things that we can do on a daily basis. 

It’s the kind of courage that draws us into the heart of God – the kind of bravery that God loves. As Paul says in Romans 5:5, hope will not disappoint us. All the people who hope in God will see their hopes fulfilled, whether here or in heaven. 

I have a great privilege of designing a bundle for Mother’s Day specifically created to give to those women who have lost their mothers. (All our Mother’s Day goodies came out last week and you can shop them right here.)  This was something I took very seriously and I spent a long time talking to women who have lost their mothers about what it was that would be helpful to say, knowing that nothing would ever take away even a little bit of the pain of a mother no longer with us on earth, but something that could, in the midst of the pain, point towards hope. The two pieces I created feature the words “Earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal.” and “United with heaven in prayer.”

I think a vital aspect of keeping hope alive in our hearts is a concerted belief that this is not all there is. Everything might not look fine here, ever. People reach the end of their lives in all kinds of states of illness, injustice, and violence. But we can maintain hope in the face of this because we believe that our hope is not for this world alone, but this world and the next. 

If everything is not made right here, which it typically is not, that is not the end of the story. It is a brave thing to hope in the face of death, and we can only do it because our Lord showed us how through his own death and resurrection. He invites us into that story, into the hope that that story will also be our own story when all is said and done.

With joy!

Jill