Finding Our Courage—How Modern Life Can Hide It From Us & A Call To Find It Again
BY AMBER BATEMAN
8/5/2024
I woke up in a sweat, my hair matted to my face. Unable to move. Frozen in my bed. I could hear my husband breathing beside me and the sound of my own heart thumping in my chest. That familiar thought, the one I have had so many times before came to me. It was just a dream. It wasn’t real. I have experienced many nightmares in my life. But this dream was different. It was deeply intense as usual. I was being attacked by a “phobia” if you will, something that has historically caused a lot of fear in my life. Usually in nightmares I’m running; running and hiding to get away from the thing that scares me. But in this particular dream, I stopped running. I turned around, looked the thing head on, and moved forward to fight it. I still felt terrified, but also a new energy, an emotional heat that stirred within me and came bursting forth, to my own surprise as well as my enemy’s. In my dream, I had found my courage.
Found my courage. Recently, I read a fiction novel in which a character was being tortured, and it talked about him, “finding his smile” in the midst of pain and fear. I have thought a lot about this since reading it. Naturally, as a mental health counselor, I think and talk a lot about emotions. I tell people that emotions happen to us. They are the natural response humans have to various experiences. If you slam your boot on my toe, I am going to have some feelings about that. I will feel physical sensations, but also emotional sensations. Surprise, hurt, confusion. I can’t help experiencing the emotion, but I can choose how to respond.
Living in modern culture has many benefits. I am grateful for running water and the ability to see a loved one’s face when physically distant. But I believe there are dangers to modern culture as well, particularly to our mental and emotional health. One of the things that can be harder to find in an affluent culture is courage. When we have access to so many resources, it can be easier to avoid having to face our fears. For example, many people are terrified of in-personal social interactions because it is so convenient to engage behind the comfort of a screen. Fear can come out of past trauma, but it can also come out of the unknown. We fear what we do not know; what we have never faced and won. The more affluent we become, the less actual risks we have to take; therefore, the less difficult challenges we experience. Not doing things that scare us makes fear grow. That’s just how anxiety works.
When you are at the bottom, when you are already poor or last, you have less to lose. I am not trying to romanticize poverty. What I am saying is that anxiety is never satisfied. It will always want more and more reassurance that things are under control; that nothing unpleasant will happen. The obvious problem is that in this universe, that can never be true. Evil exists. Suffering exists. That is life—for now. As a follower of Jesus, I believe this universe will end and a new one devoid of suffering will begin. But until then, no amount of “anxiety-paint” can cover the reality that bad things happen. But things don’t have to end there. That’s where courage comes in.
I see courage as a decision, an act of will, to choose to move forward on principle and belief and not on feeling. Courage is not ignoring or denying feelings, but pressing through them to live as if you were the person you wanted to be in that moment, no matter the feeling. Can you imagine what that would be like? Picture yourself in a difficult situation, experiencing something hard but acting as if you were the person you wanted to be.
How do we find our courage? Courage is contagious. So we must find others who are practicing it, and absorb it into our own bodies. These people may be real or fictitious characters. Those who inspire. For me, it is Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings (this blog picture), heaving his friend onto his shoulders and heading directly toward the end of their mission and almost certain death. And there’s my favorite hero of all. A real life, 33 year old man from an insignificant town who had the choice to save himself and let people get what they deserve, but instead endured humiliation, torture, demonic attacks, and death so that they may have the chance to live. When I find myself weak and fearful, I find my courage on the backs of those who have gone before me. Real or imagined souls who chose to press toward the fight when it was hardest. I want that kind of courage. I want to face my fears and show up to the fight, bloodied and bruised but unable to give up.
Courage takes conviction. It takes conviction because if you don’t know what you stand for, you won’t stand at all. And it takes practice because if you aren’t courageous in the small things, you aren’t likely to be courageous in big moments. In 1945, Desmond Doss, the pacifist solider who refused to shoot a gun, singlehandedly pulled 75 wounded men from the battlefield over the course of 12 hours. But this was not his first act of courage. Before that point, he had faced physical and psychological abuse by his fellow soldiers who saw him as a coward. But he held firm, and his story inspired others for generations to come.
Some of us may never have to fight with a physical weapon on a physical battlefield. But every one of us will face moments of fear. Opportunities to choose self-preservation or acting as if we were the person we wanted to be. To me, this is one of the greatest parts of being a counselor. It is sacred ground in which I witness ordinary people taking great leaps of courage. I think of the mother who has lost her spouse and is terrified to begin the grief journey, but drags her broken heart to the session over and over. Because she believes that her life cannot be over. Though the grief feels as if it will swallow her whole, she chooses to pursue healing for herself and the sake of her family. I think of the young man who finds out he has fathered a child and refuses to leave parenting responsibilities to the mother alone. While his peers play video games, he commits to sacrificially provide for this child. I think of those who have made terrible mistakes find their courage to confess and accept responsibility, even at the expense of their reputations and relationships.
What about you? In what ways do you need to choose courage this week? Are there decisions you need to make, emotional or relational work you need to do? Maybe you don’t feel very courageous right now. Or maybe you’ve not been courageous in even small ways and feel ashamed about that. Friend, it is never too late to choose courage. And if you are a follower of Jesus, the Spirit of God can empower you to do what you never could on your own. “For when I am weak, then I am strong,” another follower of Jesus once said.
I know there are moments in our lives that can be excruciatingly difficult. Sometimes those moments turn into seasons. And moments and seasons of emotional difficulty can cause us to become discouraged, to lose our courage. To feel as if there is no hope of the pain going away. But I am here this day to tell you there is hope. You are not small in this fight. You can find courage to face whatever lies before you. I pray you can see it. That I can see it. That life is an incredible journey and we are not alone.
Hang in there. I’m rooting for you.