True Bravery Means Facing Ourselves

“You can choose courage, or you can choose comfort. You cannot have both.” ~Brené Brown

The morning is when I step into a new day, hopefully bringing with me only what was good about the day before. Stepping into a new year holds even more hope.

Words and resolutions were once my focus. January 1 always seemed like a good time to change my life, so throwing out big goals became a tradition. As with other things in my life, though, I’ve had to stop and make a new tradition. Instead of looking far into the future, I remind myself that the only moment that exists is the one I’m living now.

When we talk about change, we often carry our hardest moments with us. Some of us carry seasons of pain and discouragement. I used to think that being brave was for the sudden changes when loss or betrayal had to be faced. When we have opposition in our lives that causes strain and broken relationships, the building of several moments is where we step and misstep to make it through, not one sudden moment.

I’m finding that part of being brave is just taking the next step into the new day. For others, stepping into the next moment is daunting. I’m learning that the first step may not be a step at all. It may be taking those moments to reflect, to be quiet, and to allow ourselves to know who we are so we can contemplate where we want to go.

We don’t often think about how brave it is to face who we are, except when we face the hard things of our past. For many of us, this is more than just dealing with old thoughts. It’s looking at what’s in front of us as our future and at the experiences behind us as our history. Sometimes it means recalculating our course, and that can be scary.

My husband and I found ourselves in a spot where we were sure our marriage was over. We were convinced that nothing new was in front of us because for years, we had been circling the same old conflicts. Something had to change. As it turns out, our circumstances didn’t need to change; our hearts and our minds needed to step into another direction. We had to imagine our lives differently and dare to see a future built on a shaky past. When we hit the biggest crisis in our marriage, we discovered just what it meant to be brave.

We began to rebuild our marriage and realized our foundation had some cracks. Some we started with while others we had created with our own insecurities. We were carrying our pasts into our future without allowing healing to take place first. Without old thoughts removed, the foundation shifts under the weight of reconstruction. It won’t just look out of kilter; it has a tiny likelihood of surviving.

Bravery means I’m a selective listener to the voices pressing into my soul. The voice claiming I am not following God’s way to train up a child. Talk that includes the shaming of my choices from discipline to healthcare to diet. It takes courage to find your identity in the Creator who made you and your children. When we truly believe what he says about us, we can lead our children to acknowledge him in their lives. As our children find their own faith, we can trust that we’ve done what he has called us to do. We can put down the measuring sticks that use human standards to preach godly truths. It takes guts to gently stand up to the noise proclaiming God’s love over our children. To be willing to admit to mistakes with humility while being kind to ourselves takes grit. When we become motivated by love, the fear of failure seems to melt away.

As a woman, I’ve had to examine things I’ve been taught about womanhood. Those things in my past that I believed were rebellious have just been my soul knowing I was made for more. In times of contemplation, I’ve allowed myself to find out who I am and who I’m created to be. My hard stories bring hope because they don’t end in the hard place. The easy path rarely leads us into anything significant. On his Desiring God Facebook page, John Piper writes, “There’s no past act that we’ve ever done that God can’t weave into a good and beautiful tapestry. That’s the kind of God we have.”

In all these lessons I’ve been encouraged to follow my passion. At face value I suppose it doesn’t seem brave, but it means changing plans. It means believing in who God created me to be and stepping into the beauty of those places. It means a new kind of hard work and a dream that was planted when I was quite young. In this new year, the foundation has been laid. I’m daring to see the world in a new way and my life in a new light, and I know my God created me for this.

Jemelene Wilson is a passionate storyteller who writes of faith, hope, love, and food. She’s madly in love with her pastor husband and mama bear to two daughters. Grace is a fairly new concept she is exploring with her life and words. Mama Jem believes we should live gently and love passionately. You can find more of her writing at jemelene.com.

Photograph © Joyce McCown, used with permission