BRAVE. It’s a word that’s been on repeat since about a week before I discovered this tiny, new babe growing within. It’s come up in conversations, popped up in cross-references, and was engraved on a bracelet that my brunette best quietly slipped off her wrist and put on my own in the middle of a beach path walk.
Four years ago, we were about to embark upon the bravest thing I’ve ever done by choice. Packing up an entire marriage into one 10-foot storage unit and hopping one-way flights to a tiny island in the middle of the ocean with five suitcases and big dreams seemed crazy. But it was the kind of chosen bravery I could control after a sort of forced bravery from circumstances that were otherwise outside of my control. The kind where being brave and being strong wasn’t really an option because there was no other thing to be.
Last weekend, I sat down for a quiet time, turning the page to a new chapter in a book I had been reading when there it was again, staring me in the face. So I stopped right there and asked it honest before God: “Why that word? Why brave?? It makes me nervous… like, what do I need to be brave FOR? Because being brave is usually to face big, scary things. And I’ve had enough big and scary for awhile.”
I put my pen down and began to read. And just as quickly, God began answering my prayer-question. “We’re addicted to big and sweeping and photo-ready. To crossing oceans, changing it all, starting new things, dreams and visions and challenges. But the rush to scramble up onto platforms, to cross oceans, to be seen and heard and known sometimes comes at a cost, and sometimes the most beautiful things we do are invisible, unsexy.”
And then came the power-punch: “Being brave is trusting that what my God is asking of me … is totally different than what our culture says we should do. Sometimes being brave looks boring, and that’s totally, absolutely, ok.” (@sniequist, Present Over Perfect)
And I let out a deep sigh of relief. Because He doesn’t always call us to the big and scary. Sometimes, He calls us to the totally, completely, and altogether boring.