Courage

I’m not very courageous.  It scares me half to death to speak in front of a crowd, so much so that I lose words completely.  They fly right out of my head, and there I stand hunting furiously for them and not finding anything to say but, “Ummmmm.”  I’m fine teaching one-on-one or to a small group of co-workers, but let my supervisor or the CEO of the company step into the room and I’ve suddenly lost all vestige of professionalism.  I stammer and stutter as if I had no idea what I was talking about. How embarrassing! 

No one will ever accuse me of being crazy enough to bunji jump off the top of a tower.  It’s not the stepping off I dread, it’s the landing.  I’m pretty sure my head is no match for the hard-packed ground or cement I’d find once I landed.  I feel the same way about going to sea in a dingy.  No, not me.  I ain’t getting’ in no boat (or no dingy either).   It’s a long, long way to the bottom and there’s no way to hold my head up above water so I can breathe.

Remember the story of the disciples and Peter’s walk on the water?  I’d have missed it entirely because I wouldn’t have gotten in the boat in the first place.  I’d have missed out on something important because I was too scared to leave the safety of land, which for all I know could be destroyed in seconds by a tsunami I didn’t see coming.  I could have walked on water with Jesus, if only I’d gotten in the boat.

How many times have I missed God’s blessings because I wouldn’t get in the boat?  Or because I wouldn’t get out of it?  How many years have I sat around waiting for God to heal me, when all it required was to give him complete control?  I don’t want to think about it – too many years wasted for no real reason outside of the fact that I was too scared (and too anal) to give up control.  What if I started sinking?  Truth is, without God in control I was already sinking anyway.

        Healing, by the way, doesn’t only cover physical and mental needs, it also covers spiritual needs.  Healing, any kind of healing, requires God.  It’s that simple. I needed to be healed of my inability to see beyond my humanness.  I needed to be taught how to live a Kingdom life, requiring that my entire thought process change.  Instead of acting like a spoiled child, I needed (still need) to start acting like a child of the King and be about my Father’s business.  Instead what I did was worry about what I did or didn’t have, what God did or didn’t do for me, and other silly things that made no difference at all in Kingdom living.

Walking on water is all about the boat – being willing to get in and go out to sea and being willing to step out in the middle of nowhere, on an open sea, in the deepest part of the ocean, and trust God to hold you up.  We sing lots of songs about our Almighty God but we’re hardly ready to let him be one.  It took cancer to teach me what it means to step out of the boat and walk on water.  It’s the difference between real life and death.  I’d rather live for Jesus than give in to the threat of death. 

After all, I’m going to die one day or another.  It’s a sure thing.  The moment we begin living we begin dying.  The difference is in what we do in between the living and the dying.  It doesn’t take courage so much as it takes trust and faith in a God who created everything, right down to the number of hairs on my head.  Courage is nothing; God is everything.  What in the world took me so long to figure that out?  Forgive me, Lord, sometimes I can be incredibly obtuse. 

I don’t think of myself as being brave.  I know I’m highly dependent on God.  I heard “cancer” and started crying.  God heard “cancer” and started healing.  Nothing is impossible with God.  Even the fact that doctors say it’s cancer can be changed by God.  And so what if the cancer comes back and I die (the chemo therapy folks practically guaranteed that’s what will happen) – even if it kills me, there’s still Jesus, right there, waiting for me.  All roads, in the end, lead back to the Father.

I remember being “brave” as a human being about one time – when someone tried to steal my brand-new Singer sewing machine (I called it Bing because it was a Singer – no one under the age of 50 will get that joke.).  I pulled up to my house during lunch break.  There was a strange truck in the driveway.  I noted the license plate and thought, wonder who that is.  I heard voices as I came closer to the front door, and realized it was broken open.  Some dude in the house was talking about taking my sewing machine.  I grabbed the closest thing I could find that was sharp, which happened to be a pitchfork.  (You don’t want to know why it was next to the front door.)  I yelled in the house for them to exit before I came after them.  They saw the pitchfork and a crazy lady standing in the door and hauled off out the back door.  I chased them.  They got into their truck and blew out of the driveway, clearing a path in the yard as they went.  Thankfully, they missed my VW bug. 

Only later did it occur to me one of them might have had a gun.  I was the talk of the sheriff’s office for quite some time, since it also didn’t occur to me to call the cops until afterward.  Of course, in that day few folks had cell phones, so I would have had to go next door to call.  Pretty dumb thing to do, risk my life for a sewing machine.  The question still is:  Am I willing to risk it all for the Lord?  Are you?

It used to bother me when people called me names, and I’ve been called everything from an animal in the zoo to ugly and useless.  I was afraid to say much for fear I’d get called a few more names.  Truth is, people can call me what they will.  As Shakespeare said, a rose by any other name is still a rose.  People call Jesus a lot of names too; doesn’t change who he is.  Scoffers are loud with name-calling, quick to taunt and boast about what they don’t need.  Sadly enough, for all their name calling, what they need the most has been there all along.  Jesus is all they will ever need, if only they could see so.

I used to react in anger when people called me names, ready to fight to the end, until one day I realized that the names they called me (and still do) don’t matter at all.  I’m still a child of the King, still call him Abba Father, still worship the only true and living God.  So go ahead, call me a few names.  Give me a reason to smile. It will give me a chance to show you the Father and teach you about the names that should matter to you – Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Holy God, Almighty Father, Prince of Peace, Loving Friend, Redeemer, Savior, Everything.