Braver: One Small Step to a Brave Life

Brave is a funny thing, you know.  Yours and mine, they looks so different.  What scares me, doesn’t scare you. I’m sure the opposite is true as well.

About a year ago, as I was struggling with the anything prayer, a friend of mine told me, “I’m really surprised that this is so hard for you.  You always seem so brave.”

Really?  Her comments confused me.  But as she listed off “brave” things that I had done (in her eyes) I realized, those things didn’t scare me.  The things she saw as brave, were well within my comfort zone.  They weren’t me being brave at all, they were me doing what I knew I was good at, doing what I knew I could do successfully.

But really, that’s not brave.

Brave takes a measure of faith.  A measure of risk. “Where feet may fail and fear surrounds me” you’ve heard it, right?  That is where you will find brave.

Brave is a chameleon 

It looks different on everyone, because different things scare us. 

The beauty of this is that there is little room for comparison.  There is no use comparing your brave to someone else’s because, save your very close friends and family, chances are you don’t even know what scares them. Those big and brave things you see them doing may be well within their comfort level, their normal.

The caveat is that a lack of courage is easy to hide if your comfort zone extends a bit beyond the norm.  You can convince the world and, even worse, yourself, that you are being brave when you aren’t at all.

No one knows what conversations you avoid.  No one knows what little lies you told to cover up an uncomfortable truth or a mistake.  No one knows what dreams you’ve been dreaming and stuffing – what you would like to do if you had more time, more money, were younger, older, fill-in-the-blank with your own worn out barrier.  It’s fairly easy to hide.  No one knows.

Brave is a changing tide

I still remember the day I called the school to un-enroll my son.  My voice was shaking, my hand trembling as I cradled the phone.  This adventure we were embarking on was brave for me.  I stepped with hesitation – how badly can I screw up kindergarten, right? – but I stepped, just the same.  That was 6 years ago.  It’s gone well and we’re comfortable. Homeschooling, in general, isn’t brave for me anymore, it’s my new comfort zone.

Sometimes we take our past braves and think they will last us a lifetime.  We cozy up with them, build a little cocoon around them and think we are somehow wearing the medal of a brave life. But it doesn’t work that way.

Brave is a changing tide, a shifting current.  Life happens.  People get sick.  We lose jobs, we lose friends and marriage is tough.  Our kids have attitudes and struggles that demand our courage to parent well.  The dynamics of a brave day, a brave life, are continually shifting and the choice to shore up the cocoon or take the next brave step is always right in front of us.

That is really what it all comes down to, the next brave step.  A brave life is simply a series of brave steps.  One at a time, the one right in front of you, today.

You know what scares you.  You know what challenges you face.  You know what dreams make your voice shake and your stomach tremble.  You know what you are stuffing and suppressing and yet can’t stop thinking about.

Choosing brave is hard.  It can feel monstrous, really.  So what if today, we just chose braver?  Braver than yesterday.  Braver than before.  Each and every day, braver.