Courage

Listen to G. K. Chesterton on courage:

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. The paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.”

So many examples of courage have arisen this year as events and circumstances have boiled us in the frog pot of life. Front-line healthcare workers, police chiefs who remove their helmets and march for justice, protesters protecting others and the livelihood of others from opportunistic barbarians, essential business employees who showed up and made sure the rest of us could shelter in-place. Just a few of so many.

We continue to be called to live sacrificially. We cannot abrogate OUR responsibility to “act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God” (Micah 6:8) by finding scapegoats however worthy, by passing the buck to others or worse to our government, and then expecting our lack of personal courage to create anything more than what we already have.

As we face and think about the events that 2020 has bestowed upon us so far, may we each “desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.” May we be personally defined by our courage to step into and deal with hard things.