[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

One Small Brave Thing

I did one small brave thing yesterday. It really was a *small* brave thing 
-- merely making a phone call I didn't especially want to make -- but it 
did take a modicum of courage, because the last time I'd talked to this 
person, I'd gotten hurt. Not badly hurt, but enough hurt that picking up 
the phone was a small *brave* thing.

I got the concept of "one small brave thing" from a woman I know (hi, 
Patricia!) who used the idea to get herself out from a hellacious big, deep 
hole -- the sort of ungodly mess that most people find themselves in at 
least once in their lives, unless they're exceptionally lucky. The hole was 
so big and so deep that she couldn't begin to imagine how she'd extricate 
herself, until God whispered to her that all she needed was to do one brave 
thing each day. Two if she could manage it; but if she couldn't even manage 
one, she wasn't to beat herself up about it, but to try again the next 
day.  Beating oneself up is just about as counterproductive as giving up, 
so she wasn't to do either.

It worked. It took time, but the more she exercised her courage, the 
stronger it got. Courage, like endurance and patience and love and all 
those other old-fashioned virtues, is a muscle; use it or lose it. The more 
we chicken out on doing what we *know* needs to be done, the harder it gets 
to accomplish, and then we may find ourselves dug in so deep that to 
extricate ourselves does indeed require one small brave thing per day for 
many, many days.  I'd expect courage to get downright brawny from daily 
usage, and it does -- but behaving bravely doesn't necessarily diminish 
anxiety. It just robs it of its power to paralyze. I may still feel 
anxious, but I get done what needs to get done, regardless.

That being said, what's courage for me isn't necessarily courage for you; 
something may make me hideously anxious that doesn't even begin to faze you 
-- or vice versa. If you seem to balk at something that seems easy to me, 
maybe it's because I don't know your history. Maybe what seems awfully 
small to me bulks very large indeed for you. Or maybe something that
seemed small on Tuesday looks much, much bigger on Friday because of what 
went down on Thursday. Define "small". Define "brave".

Circumstances obviously come into it too. For two gay lovers, walking 
hand-in-hand through the gay district of Toronto is a commonplace -- an act 
of pure comfort, no courage at all. For two gay lovers, doing the same in 
any number of other cities would be an act of almost insane courage; it 
could get them killed. Picking up the phone to call a friend who's angry at 
you in order to straighten things out is quite another thing from making 
that call to put an end to a violent relationship. Any act has its 
consequences, and sometimes a small brave act has enormous fallout, and 
sometimes the fallout isn't what we ever imagined.

Sometimes I can't predict the small/brave ratio until I've actually done 
whatever-it-is that's my small brave act for the day. I may hang up the 
phone and say, "Wow, that was easy -- wonder why I thought it'd be hard?" 
Or I may hang up the phone and sit there, concentrating on my breathing to 
get my suddenly off-the-chart anxiety levels back down again. If I knew how 
I'd feel about it afterwards, it wouldn't require courage, would it?

But we know courage is the right way, the Godward way, because we see that 
in the life of Jesus, who marched straight off into the desert without a 
backward glance, who sweated blood the night before his crucifixion and 
then marched straight into that too -- and if we believe that the outcome 
was assured and that this was all a temporary inconvenience, then we forget 
how real his terror and his suffering were. We diminish his humanity when 
we neglect that side of things.

We neglect God's courage too -- God's act of trust that this, however 
difficult, however much it made God suffer, was the way to win us. God knew 
that Jesus would rise from the dead, but given our free will, God had to 
gamble that we'd get the message. (And in fact, we don't always.) What sort 
of act of courage was it on God's part, to supply this particular lamb for 
the sacrifice?

My small brave act last night won't set the world to rights, or even this 
particular relationship, but it was still the right thing to do and I'm 
glad I did it.  My small brave act for today was listening to someone who I 
thought was on the other side of the fence from me, and learning in the 
process that we were, in fact, on the same side of the fence -- and that 
wasn't hard at all.

My small brave act for tomorrow is going to be tackling the freezer 
compartment. Now, *that's* brave.