The Nineteenth Time

It is not courageous to have convictions.

Convictions are easy. Convictions are quick. Convictions speak of who we are at our best, or who we see our best can be, or who the world sees when the lights are on and we are most aware and most vocal.

I believe in writing. I believe in the power of prayer. I believe in all-the-time honesty, all-the-time integrity, and all-the-time service. I believe books change lives, and I believe the television wastes them. I believe in the Bible as my personal foundation, as the foundation of my family, and as the ultimate and true source of wisdom and feasting for my soul. But none of this makes me courageous.

I came to these convictions in many ways. Some I experienced. Some I was taught. Some I am reminded of regularly by excited, excitable, like-minded people who make it easy to stay convinced. All of them I can state, rather easily, in casual coffee conversation or in deep debate.

But it requires nothing of me to have convictions. Yet it has become trendy to place on a pedestal those who verbalize their convictions, as if that were the hardest part. We place a premium on what people say, or post, or tweet, showering them with praise and likes for their courage of conviction if the words they are using mirror the thoughts of our own hearts. But to have convictions, to speak or type or share them, costs little.

Courage, rather, is standing for your convictions and priorities when its hard. Courage is re-upping and relearning a truth worthy of devotion after violating it, again, more passionately and more firmly each time. Courage is acting on the light when you're in the dark.

And you don't display courage because you already have it. I don't believe anyone is innately courageous. Rather, the courageous create courage. They begin, petrified or exhausted or beaten, and they make a small decision on behalf of their convictions anyway because they're tired of being less than who they want to be, tired of disappointing themselves. Then they feed that little shoot of courage, growing it, stretching it, because it might not need to be stronger the second and third time around, but certainly it will be tested the nineteenth and twentieth when it's no longer exciting and no longer popular and there's no one left to impress.

To remain full of courage, the courageous focus on their convictions. They stare at the truth. They repeat the truth. They find people in their lives who will speak the truth to them as well. Someone far stronger, far more experienced, who has lived the truth. Someone younger, energetic, who isn't too tired or cynical to believe it. Someone with great fervor; someone with great calm.

Feelings and excitement will fade. The conference or pep rally will end. Sunday morning's sermon will turn into Monday morning's challenges. You will say good night after the first date, or after the first anniversary. The angelic and pure newborn will become a loquacious, confrontational 3-year old. You will say amen, leaving the eternal to face the immediate. The crowd, the like-minded, will go home. But the truth you found in those feelings won't be any less true.

Can you keep it? Can you act on it? Through sickness and health? Through fatigue and loneliness? Through boredom? Through busyness? Will you still act on the convictions you speak?

That, I find, is courage. Those are the brave. And I want to be one of them.