Brave Faith

“Want to know the truth about bravery?

When we think about bravery and courage, we often imagine those moments from movies. A hero is up against impossible odds. It’s difficult but he leans into the challenge and survives! Bravery is grimaces and grinding it out and wiping sweat off your brow as you save the day! Yay, bravery!

Here’s the truth about bravery:

Bravery makes you want to throw up. Bravery makes you cry. A lot. Bravery makes you lose sleep. Bravery makes you lose weight or gain lots of stress pounds. Bravery is ugly and messy and not at all heroic looking when it’s really happening. It’s hard.

Next time you feel like a coward because you’re about to make a difficult decision and you feel like throwing up, don’t beat yourself up. Next time you feel afraid and don’t want to keep going, don’t give up. Bravery is a choice, not a feeling.

Choose it.”

Jon Acuff, New York Times Best Selling author, posted this on his Facebook page recently. Reading this, I saw in it the truth of everyday at Casa Bernabe. Everything he says about bravery is true of our kids and the staff tasked with caring for them. Our kids are the bravest, most courageous, amazing examples of God’s love. The joy that they live with after the traumas they’ve endured is unbelievable. To just meet these kids, you may never be able to tell that they have experienced abuse or neglect. You’d never know all they’ve been through. But we do. Our house parents experience the sleepless nights, the tears, the doubts and the fears that our children suffer through on their path to bravery. Caring for vulnerable children is an ugly, messy, nasty thing. There are days when it feels anything but heroic, but it is.

Through the week we’ve talking about “entering in” as we have looked at dreaming and loving and living, wildly, recklessly, and differently. I don’t believe we can do any of those things without also being brave. The choice of bravery is what will propel us into action no matter where God is calling you.

Bravery is an exercise of your faith in God. These two ideas are wound together: being brave requires faith, and having faith requires bravery. What does the Bible urge us to do, again and again, in the face of fear? To trust in the Lord. God gave all of us the capacity for bravery. But true Godly bravery means living out life according to what God alone tells us. This means putting our faith in God, and putting His plans for us first, above all other plans.

Bravery is doing things even when you’re scared. It isn’t something that happens when you’re not scared anymore. Brave people don’t stop hearing the whispers of fear. They hear the whispers but take action anyway. Jill Briscoe wrote, “Courage isn’t a feeling you wait for. Courage is doing when you don’t have courage. Courage is doin it scared.”

I can tell you that the moments of my greatest fears — those times when I was sure I was going to wimp out under the pressure of it all — have also been the open doors to the greatest changes in my life. So I step out, full of fear, but trusting that God is on the other side in new and wonderful ways. And so far? He always is.

It’s easy to feel like you’ve been pushed past your limit. It’s easy to feel like God is giving you more than you can handle. But, God will always be there to help you come through it. He will never let you down.

No matter what God is calling you to or where He is calling you to go, it will take bravery, courage. Making tough decisions no one will understand at the time. Doing what is right, every time, when those around you are trying to find an easy way out. Living your values on a moment-to-moment basis. Not allowing anyone or anything to change who you are even in those pressure moments. Going. Staying. Dreaming. Loving. It all takes bravery.

I want to remind you of these words from the beginning of the week: If God has been tugging at you to do something but you’re hesitant because you aren’t “ready,” it doesn’t make sense, or you don’t have your 36-point plan drafted, proofed and put into place with the end game strategy fully defined, welcome to the club. John Ortberg says, “…’feeling ready’ is not the ultimate criterion for determining the places you’ll go. God says, ‘I have set before you an open door,’ not ‘I have set before you a finished script.’ An open door is a beginning, an opportunity, but it has no guaranteed ending. It’s not a sneak peek at the finish. If it is to be entered, it can be entered only by faith.”

I don’t know what God is asking you to do today. I don’t know what he has laid on your heart this week. I only hope that you would heed his call. As we close, I want to share these words with you.

“Living radical isn’t about where you live - it’s about how you love. It’s about realizing - love doesn’t happen when you arrive in a certain place. It happens when your heart arrives in a certain place, right where you are. It isn’t where we love. It’s how we love. It’s who we love. The success of loving is in how we change because we kept on loving. People are starved for Christ everywhere; there are poor too down our streets and down our halls and down our pews. Radical begins finding them and radically loving them. You are doing something great with your life when you’re doing all the small things with His Great love.

We want clarity; God wants us to come closer. Life is always clear when you press closer and see it through the sheer love of God.

Love is complicated and the simplest thing in the world. And that is all there is.” Ann VosKamp