Courage
A dying virtue?
I’m not sure if I’m the only one who feels this way.
Because I’m not sure, I have to confess, sometimes it feels lonely.
Perhaps it’s born out of cultivated cynicism, coupled with my tendency to be impatient. I try to be cautious. I don’t want to be judgmental. I’ve lived long enough to know I’ve been or am guilty of most sins, poor judgements, or whatever label you want to call it. Yet it seems to me that I see more people than I’ve ever noticed in the past who are people pleasers. Particularly men. Men who are consumed by anxiety almost to paralysis. Especially among men, the tendency to look to others to do or say hard things when the time requires it. Worse yet, to put our heads down and do nothing, look to no one, especially ourselves when conscious beckons otherwise. One example I was reminded of recently occurred during the “Covid-19” years. A particular church was still meeting but doing so outdoors in an attempt to adhere to the social distancing protocol of the time. A stranger showed up and was behaving belligerent, particularly towards some female attendees. The men did nothing. The husbands did nothing. No one stood in the gap to address the situation on behalf of their wives, girlfriends, children, elderly, their so-called brothers and sisters. To add insult to injury, they called my best friend, my brother in the faith (not realizing he was traveling that weekend) asking when he was going to show up at the church to ‘take care of the situation’. I’m unclear as to how the matter was resolved but I do recall hearing the men of this church repeatedly saying to my brother, “If you were here, this would have never happened.”
Yet what I’m referring to has little to do with physical situations, as important as those are. As I read history, I’m amazed and humbled by how courageous so many people were in the face of overwhelming obstacles and hostilities. An example would be reading Frederick Douglas’ letter to his former slave owner, or his public speech entitled, “What to the slave is the 4th of July?” The latter is presented by his decedents who are children. I would strongly encourage you to listen and watch both. What strikes me is the contrast. We live in a day I fear that we hide our fear… our cowardice… behind our intellect. Behind our passive Christianity. Our incessant need to maintain the ‘reasonable middle’ ground that makes us look mature, sure footed, reliable, safe when in reality, we are complicit, comfortable, inconsiderate, cowardly pawns playing the all-too-common tune on the piano of people pleasing. Frederick Douglass was articulate. He was intelligent. Yet his words were matter of fact and to the point. There was no dancing to the tune of the masses yet in the end he assures his former enslaver that his home would be the safest place in the world for him and he would want for nothing so that he could set the example. Truly a man of grit and grace. Truly we can do better.
I cannot say I’m naturally an outspoken or courageous person. I laugh when people have said that I’m a ‘natural leader’. I don’t know of any such thing. I look back to the child I was like he is a stranger. I mourn for him from time to time. No child should carry that much fear, born out of insecurity, fed by a world where hope had grown cold. I’m reminded of the saying from Game of Thrones where Jon Snow is seeking counsel from Maester Aemon. Maester Aemon cuts through all the fear and drama with the line,
“Kill the boy and let the man be born!”
The Bible does talk about child like faith, praying with a childlike wonder and expectancy. But if you push a point too far you end up breaking the very point you are trying to make. There are other areas where we are to mature in our faith, to move from milk to the meat of the word. To stand, to be bold, to destroy, to contend, to put on armor. You get the point. Some of us need to kill the child and get about the business of being the men God has called us to be. I find it ironic that Christ has so orchestrated my life that saying and doing hard things is almost all I do vocationally and often personally. When I trace God’s hand and see it as a calling, my passion can endure. As soon as I take my eyes off of Him, the landscape becomes incredibly sketchy. It can be disheartening. When I look over history and see the endurance of those who came before I draw courage to do, say, and be more.
For those who are on the precipice of not knowing if you can endure life, I just want to offer you the hope that was made clear to me and encourage you to hold on. There is what appears to be a contradiction in the Bible, that I’ve found was the only way for me to survive some pretty challenging circumstances and overcome my fear. What I discovered is often we try to hold on to life so hard that we squeeze the very joy out of our existence. We clutch at things that will never ultimately satisfy, comfort, or answer the pains and insecurities we foster until we strangle the very hope God offers out of the air around us. We bear hug our wounds leaving no room for a deliverer. We don’t realize that the only way to save our lives is to lose them. To let go of whatever we are clinging to outside of God for hope, no matter what the cost, and fight with fury for Him… not His gifts, not the ‘ministry’, not the cause, not the church, not the (fill in the blank). But Him. Only when you are willing to lose your life do you have a chance at finding true life.
There’s a quote by G.K. Chesterton I read years ago that, for me, perfectly describes the key to living a life of courage. I was putting this in practice long before I ever read or could articulate the concept for myself. It means so much to me (and my need for reminders) that I have my favorite phrase from the passage tattooed on my forearm - “Desire life like water and yet drink death like wine”
I hope it offers you the same courage and fortitude that it has me over the years.
“Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”
Because of Him,
Ron