thoughts on courage.

I vividly remember [clear as crystal] the night I chose the words powerful and courageous to describe who I was [are those appropriate words for a evangelical woman to describe herself as?! ;)] I remember being called a woman that night by someone who actually beleived it. Cold, we were, sitting on a bench eating ice cream, and venturing into places we have never been before--verbalizing ideas freshly explored. It was a beautifully vulnerable moment, really.

That was many years ago, seems like decades [but I haven't even been alive for 2 decades, so it couldn't have been]. Those words, powerful and courageous, have traveled with me. Sometimes I didn't seem fit to carry them, sometimes I didn't even want to carry them. But it was almost impossible to let them go, and I don't think I really wanted to let them go, either.

[Those words and I are one and the same] and we have been to places I never even knew existed, and some places I never wish to visit again.

Courage is never a pure noun, is it? It has, for me, always been mixed with fear and other emotions that make my stomach flip around and tie in knots. For most of my life courage has manifested itself in the form of words. These words are like the moments before you are going to throw up: you start to have hot flashes [the top of your head sweats] and you realize that whatever is inside of you has to come out, and waiting to throw up is almost as bad as actually doing it.

I've been thinking a lot about tensions recently. Mainly how I need to embrace places of tension instead of running away from them. If courage is something that doesn't come with age, but rather grows as we experience hard things, then how does that relate to having enough courage to enter into places saturated in tension?

All I'm saying is that I want to become a woman that isn't afraid to have hard conversations, to get messy, to say that I don't know but I want to talk about it. Isn't that what we're supposed to do? What a shame it would be, my dear friends, if we lived our lives seeking places of comfort and safety.

This is difficult. Can we admit that? Is it ok to tear down our walls and admit that we don't know what the hell we're doing? This is really hard, and most days I don't know where to start.

May you sit in the tension. Embrace the tension, whatever that may be--because it is in those places where beauty is waiting to be discovered. I would remind you to not forget your power and courage, but something tells me that you carry them always. And for that I am glad.