When I was a boy, I raced through the woods behind my grandmother’s house with a stolen butter knife tucked away in my belt loop. It kept falling, so eventually I had to stash it in my pocket. For a few mythic afternoons, I made the woods into my Neverland. My dad held a deep fear of guns, so I gravitated toward heroes like MacGyver and Peter Pan. Whether it was guns, swords, or duct tape, the end was the same: I wanted to fight for a valiant purpose, a battle which could only be won with courage.
So many little boys play army and go to war with each other. Imagining courage, they dream of throwing themselves on a grenade to save the day. Years later, soldiers return from war with a desire to never go back again. The authentic experience of courage falls somewhere in the gap between.
People may say, “I felt so courageous”, but it is not possible to feel courageous. We can feel confident or optimistic, and we can take immense risks. But can we really feel courage? We can be courageous. Others can describe us as such. A soldier who rushes into battle while bullets whiz by his helmet feels fear. Those of us who later hear his war stories deem him as courageous. But I doubt any solider who sprints into the line of fire feels courage. The idea that we can feel courage is a myth.
Courage feels like fear. Courage occurs when we feel fear and choose to move forward with our task despite our heart’s warning of danger. Ask anyone about an instance when they acted courageously, and they will likely describe their fear. A pastor told me once that, when he first started teaching, his friends almost had to drag him onto stage. While the band played the final worship song before his entrance, he fought the urge to run and hide.
If courage feels more like fear than confidence, we can accept that, in order to live courageously, we must first embrace fear as a gift. If you want to live courageously, you must start with your vulnerability and fear.
Brene Brown points out, “Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor- the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant “To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.”
By telling all one’s heart…talk about vulnerability and fear. In the journey of recovering heart, we step back into fear rather than away from it. And this exposure becomes an act of immense courage. I used to think and hope this would be a one-time jump in the act of becoming an adult. But though our fears change, fear never goes away, and thus we must move into it over and over again. In the process, we grow up.
Theodore Roosevelt cheers us on: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…”
We cannot feel courage. We can only feel fear and move toward that which we fear. When we move toward fear, we step into our arenas, and we risk the exposure of our face and heart, and thus act courageously.
Process
What arenas is God asking you to step into with your heart?
What fears arise as your feet touch the sand?
