The word courage comes from the Latin cor, which means heart. It is not just that courage comes from the heart, but that courage is the willingness to jump into a situation heart first, fully exposed and vulnerable to harm and betrayal and pain, but nevertheless confident that the risk is ultimately worth it and that we will manage either to survive or be revivified should the challenge prove too much for us. When we confront a situation that requires courage, by definition, we will feel fear. Our fear comes from experience. We have been hurt before. We do not like to be hurt. Our fear wants to encase our heart in armor so that nothing ever happens to it. But when we let fear call the shots, not only do we end up with a hard heart, but we get our wish. Nothing will ever happen to us. Nothing bad, maybe. But also, nothing good. Ernest Hemingway called courage “grace under pressure.” Our Savior Jesus Christ wants to bless us with His grace, and He requires us to have the courage to place ourselves under pressure, so that we may invite that grace to sustain us through that pressure. Jesus had the courage to jump heart first into an infinity of pain. He knew it would cause Him to quake and to tremble and to bleed at every pore, but He did it anyway because He followed His heart. He let perfect love cast out His fear. Having courage means sometimes our hearts will be broken. This is a sacrifice that the Lord has asked us to make. But He also promises that if we will have the courage to risk our hearts, even to the breaking, then He will give us a new heart, not to be locked away, safe and protected in a hard shell of fear, but risked again and lost again and replaced again. The more times we exercise courage, the stronger our hearts will become and the wiser too. We will err less often on the side of either foolhardiness or cowardice. We will be perfectly balanced between fear and confidence and we will break our hearts less often and delay requesting and accepting a new heart less frequently. I know that it is scary to jump heart first into an unknown situation. That fear will never truly leave us because we could not have courage without fear. But we can build a habit of fusing our fear and confidence into courage by boldly stepping into the furnace of affliction and knowing that we will come out the other end stronger or wiser or both.
