4
Choose Brave

IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE BIG

Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if we have to dig a little to find it.

Tori Amos

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.

Joshua 1:9

Having already lost her father hours before she gave birth to her son, Becky was eight months pregnant with her daughter when her husband died.

It’s true, no one gets to skip the tough stuff.

So what are we meant to do?

When I was diagnosed with rectal cancer six weeks after losing Jo, Al and I faced shattering our kids’ lives all over again as we told them the news.

Life’s really not fair at all.

So what are we meant to do?

Having witnessed her husband’s temper and abusive ways, Abigail discovered armed men were heading toward her house (1 Sam. 25).

We can end up living a life we never signed up for.

So what are we meant to do?

Adulting isn’t just hard, it has an annoying tendency to be overwhelming and life-shattering too, and when it slapped me in the face I felt frightened, out of control, and out of choices.

I like being in control—it makes me feel safe and strong. And having choices reminds me I am, despite everything, still in control, even if just by a sliver. I like to know what’s coming and be the master of my own destiny, and I hate feeling like a puppet on someone else’s string. But the moment I became a cancer patient that’s exactly how I felt.

Everything was laid out and decided for me: appointments, treatments, drugs, surgeries, and—thanks to an army of friends—even what we ate for dinner and how the kids got to their activities. Feeling powerless, I fixated on the few decisions I could make: Whether to order the mini-mega-mocha-choca or the simple cappuccino at Starbucks. Whether to splurge on those cute suede boots I’d had my eye on but absolutely did not need. Small choices like these became everything. And yes, in case you’re wondering, I got the cappuccino and the boots.

So what are we meant to do?

It seemed like Becky, Abigail, and I were up the creek without a paddle, facing lives we hadn’t signed up for and with our choices snatched from our grasp. But we did have a choice, and you do too. We can choose brave, and thankfully doing so doesn’t require us to be brave, only to choose the next right thing.

Choosing brave is our first practice because it is the one that enables us to step into all the others, and thankfully brave isn’t something we are by virtue of our inherited gene pool. It’s something we choose, minute by minute, painful terrified step by painful terrified step. It may not be a delicious “vanilla or chocolate” kind of choice, leaving hot fudge sauce dripping through our fingers, but rather a hard “take a deep breath and brace yourself” kind of choice. But it is a choice, even if we have to dig a little to find the courage to make it.

Choosing Brave Is Not the Same as Being Fearless

While giving birth to her daughter Libby, Becky sobbed. In a moment meant to be filled with tears of joy and the cry of her newborn baby, her heartache collapsed in on her. Exhaustion dragged her under and a deep longing for life to be different closed in.

Seven years earlier, Becky and Keith got engaged after meeting at church. He was the quiet, caring pastor’s son. She was four years his junior and every bit as gregarious as he was unassuming. They began to hang out, discovered shared passions, started dating, and fell in love.

Two days after he popped the question, they were told Keith had anaplastic large-cell lymphoma (ALCL), a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. They juggled surgery, chemo, and radiation trips with guest lists, invitations, and tuxedo fittings. Then, after a year of treatment, they tied the knot and raised their glasses to a fresh start. Newly married, with Keith’s cancer behind them, Becky assumed they had survived their allotted adult crisis and looked forward to her happily ever after. Like so many of us, she couldn’t have anticipated the unseen pain and loss marching unrelentingly toward her.

When Becky’s father died just hours after their son Caleb was born, she says, “Anything I thought I knew about grief went straight out of the window.”1 She admits she spent the next year numb, wondering why she couldn’t have her dad and her son, while stoically pretending life was fine.

They moved to DC, determined to make yet another fresh start, creating new memories as Caleb grew. Until Keith, now a doctor himself, began to wake at night drenched in sweat, and Becky knew something was dreadfully wrong. Perhaps the ALCL was back; they’d been told it could recur within the first five years. But just before Christmas they were given far more devastating news. It wasn’t ALCL. It was another cancer—a rare, aggressive, and untreatable kind. It gave them, at best, a year together.

On New Year’s Eve, just ten days after his shocking diagnosis and after a day spent treating his own patients, Keith was admitted to the hospital. Five days later he said it was time for him to go to heaven, and within an hour he was there. He hadn’t even had time to start chemo.

Becky says the next month was full of anger and confusion. She knew God is sovereign, but he’d obviously stopped paying attention and had left her living a nightmare: eight months pregnant with their second child, caring for young Caleb, her heart and her life shattered.

Becky and Keith had picked out their daughter’s name together: Elizabeth “Libby” Grace after Keith’s grandmother and the grace God had always shown them. She came into the world just as she lives it today, kicking with energy and life.

Fast-forward a little over two years to the present as Becky and I chat on the phone, her two precious littlies chattering in the background. She is doing brilliantly. She writes and cheers on anyone setting off on a new adventure or struggling with mental health issues, and she’s a wonderful mother who smiles a lot, especially when she’s eating ice cream. Battling anxiety and depression, her life’s not perfect and pain-free by any stretch of the imagination, but it is full.

When people ask her how she does it, how she’s kept going, even finding joy and laughter buried in the rubble, she says she chooses brave every day. It doesn’t mean she’s fearless. “I’m far from it,” she laughs. There’s more than enough fear in her life for that. It means when faced with a choice between stepping into something hard but life-giving or taking the easier option of staying in the familiar pain of the present, she chooses to step ahead scared.

Becky reminds me of Bethany Hamilton, who triumphed in professional surfing despite losing her arm in a shark attack. Bethany says, “Courage doesn’t mean you don’t get afraid. Courage means you don’t let fear stop you.”2 And like Bethany, Becky doesn’t let her fears stop her from living her painful new life to the full.

Choosing brave is nothing new. Just as Joshua is about to lead the people of Israel into the promised land, God commands him to choose brave by stepping out in courage (Josh. 1:9). He doesn’t urge him or invite him. He doesn’t reason with him, arguing it would be in Joshua’s best interest. He commands him and gives Joshua full assurance he will go with him.

Becky and Keith knew God would go with Becky as she journeyed on after he died. That’s why Becky, like Joshua, can choose brave in the face of her daily fear, and it’s why we can too.

God commands us to do the same, choosing brave for ourselves if we are to enter our own promised land—our abundant life—and we can do so knowing he will be with us whatever we face.

Choosing Brave Isn’t Always Big, but It’s Always Intentional

Despite feeling like a cancer puppet pulled around by bouts of nausea, a poop bag, and the never-ending rounds of doctors’ offices and blood work, in reality I had to make hundreds of choices, big and small, every day. Some were important choices about my medical care. Others felt more tender, like when and how to tell my still-grieving dad and sister, or how vulnerable to be with our church. Then there were choices I had to make instantly, like whether or not to punch the lady who told me her uncle had just died a painfully agonizing death from rectal cancer. (I’ll leave you guessing what I chose on that one.)

Early on, the biggest choice we faced was how to tell our kids. It loomed overhead like a piano swinging from a balcony, waiting to drop and destroy the safety of our family. The easy choice was to run from under its shadow and keep quiet, to put it off and tell them later. We knew it would freak them out. Having lost their grandma and auntie to cancer, as far as they knew people who got cancer died, and died quickly. The thought of telling them the same heat-seeking missile of death was now locked on their mum’s rear end filled us with dread. Should we keep it to ourselves for a few more weeks, or maybe just tell them I’m sick but leave out the “c” word? Perhaps they’re too young? But no, they weren’t too young, and our family has never operated in half-truths and white lies. If we were going to get through this, we’d do it together—as Team Hardy.

Our worn and well-loved kitchen table traveled from England with us, and over the years its solid pine top has been graced with Christmas dinners, Lego castles, glitter creations, and math homework. Now, as we sat around it in our usual dinnertime places, about to share life-altering news, I was grateful to lean on its sturdy, familiar strength.

We told them doctors had found a large tumor and although they weren’t certain what it was, they were pretty sure it was some kind of cancer. Until that moment, my colonoscopy—with its preparation that had confined me to within a ten-second sprint of the loo and left my insides as clean as a whistle—had been a family joke. But as we broke the news, no one laughed. We shared what we knew—the plan for radiation, chemo, and surgery—and what we didn’t, what this new reality would look like and how the days ahead would unfold. Once they heard the words “mum” and “cancer” uttered in the same breath, any reassurances it wasn’t the same cancer that Ma (my mum) and Auntie Jo Jo had were lost. Their mum had cancer. Period.

Sophie’s voice, soft and fearful and so different from her usual boisterous confidence, broke the silence, asking the million-dollar question I hadn’t even dared ask myself.

“Are you going to die, Mummy?”

Inhaling deeply, I leaned in, smiling, our brown eyes locked on one another. “Yes, darling, one day I will. But I pray not now, not from this.”

I exhaled, turning my gaze to include James and Emma.

“I hope to be around for a long, long time. But whatever happens, God is good, we can trust him, and he’ll be with us every step of the way.”

The faith pep talk was as much for me as it was for them.

By stepping into that conversation, we set the scene for how the Hardys would roll on this one: together, with no blindfolds, work-arounds, or white lies. As hard as it was, I have no regrets. It created an environment where the kids could be honest, ask questions, and share their fears, secure in the knowledge we’d tell them the truth. It brought life into a deadly situation and drew us together rather than dividing us with the illusion of half-truths.

At the time, we didn’t feel brave. We were scared—really scared. Telling them was risky. What if we were doing the wrong thing? What if they couldn’t handle it and we couldn’t handle their not handling it? There were no guarantees, and an easier option was there for the taking, even if we didn’t believe it was a better one. It was right to tell them. Hard but right.

But isn’t that always the way? The intentional, hard right choice always leads to a fuller, richer life than the one found down the easier path of least resistance. Leaving an abusive relationship, forgiving the guy who left you at the altar, seeking family counseling when you discover your teen is self-harming, or admitting your credit card debt is out of control are all brave choices. But so is going to work when your boss is a jerk, getting out of bed when your depression hits hard, showing up for a blind date because you’re fed up with being single, or saying “Yes, I’ll build a fort with you” when the new baby kept you up all night. These are all brave choices, friend.

Choosing brave isn’t always big, but it is always intentional, and as we move ahead with intention, secure God is with us, we can steer ourselves into the abundance he has waiting for us.

Choosing Brave Is Always Worth It

Nabal was a mean, surly, brutish man, self-centered and evil in his dealings (1 Sam. 25:3) and probably far too fond of hitting the wineskin. Nabal means “fool” in Hebrew, and he certainly lived up to his name. Abigail was his beautiful and intelligent wife, whose name in contrast means “father’s joy.” Yet I can only imagine the verbal, physical, and possible sexual abuse she must have endured in this arranged marriage. She was trapped in a marriage she never agreed to, to a man she couldn’t trust.

We meet this couple, as different as their names suggest, in 1 Samuel 25, when David is on the run from King Saul. While hiding in the desert, David and his men had taken care of Nabal’s shepherds and their sheep. As it was now sheep-shearing time—a time marked by celebration and generosity—David sends a message to Nabal asking for special food for his men in return for their kindness. Being a mean-spirited and selfish man, Nabal refuses. In an impulsive outburst he not only rejects the request but goes on to insult David and his men in one long, angry tirade. Equally impulsive, David retaliates by vowing to kill every male in Nabal’s household. Violence, bloodshed, and heartache seem inevitable.

I’m sure this wasn’t the first time her hotheaded husband’s cruel words had put Abigail in danger. We don’t know how many times she’d faced the consequences of his actions before, but this time she chooses to act.

If Abigail had always followed her husband’s example, taking her anger and fear out on those around her, she wouldn’t have earned the trust and respect of his men and been told about the attack. Instead, by her choosing respect and kindness over judgment and anger, probably on a daily basis, Nabal’s servants come to her with their news.

When she hears of the bloodshed heading toward them, Abigail has a choice: take action and risk her husband’s wrath, or keep quiet and hide in fear and bitterness. Abigail chooses the brave, right thing, and while Nabal is busy stuffing his face and getting drunk, she gathers the generous gift he had refused to offer, goes out to David, and bows before him, extinguishing his burning desire to retaliate. The household is saved.

When Nabal wakes up the next morning (with what must have been one heck of a hangover) and Abigail tells him what she has done, he collapses in a fit of rage and dies ten days later. When David finds out, he asks Abigail to be his wife. Now a widow, she willingly joins him, taking her five maidservants with her.

Talk about blessings. She’s no longer married to a brutish man prone to fits of rage but to David, a man after God’s own heart. By choosing brave every day—from the way she treated her servants to her decision to act as peacemaker—she traded in the life she’d been surviving for a fuller, more abundant life of love, friendship, and safety.

I wish it were that easy, but it rarely is. I can’t promise that by choosing brave you’ll be whisked away from your terrible today into a beautiful tomorrow in the arms of a handsome man of God. But I can guarantee you that choosing brave will always produce fruit—rich, juicy fruit that will last (John 15:16)—because that is what God gives us when we remain in him.

When we lay down our hurt and fear, our unforgiveness, our desire to get even, or our need to see ourselves as a victim, we choose brave and hold up our banner of victory. It’s a banner over more life, more healing, and more joy. As Lysa TerKeurst says, “It is impossible to hold up the banners of victim and victory at the same time. Our choice to give grace gives God the opportunity to step in and rewrite our story.”3 Let’s give God that opportunity in our lives.

When Becky emailed me with things she wants you to know, she said this: “With every difficult situation, you have a choice: to run away or to face the hard thing. Each time you choose the brave thing and walk through the difficult situation, you are guaranteed to grow in character, find hope sooner, and experience more freedom from fear than you would have if you had avoided the struggle.”4

She’s right. By choosing brave we choose to step away from merely surviving and walk hand in hand with God into the abundant life he has for us.

What Does Choosing Brave Look Like?

How do we make this choice toward life and away from empty survival mode? Well, so much of it depends on our willingness to trust God in the thick of it.

Becky, drowning in grief and questions, still believed God was sovereign. Somehow I knew that whether I lived or died, God was good and would be with us. Abigail, riding out to meet David without the permission of her hot-tempered and brutish husband, knew God was with David and he would do right by her (1 Sam. 25:30–33).

Brave isn’t who we are or are not. We can’t buy it on eBay or find an extra stash of it under the mattress. Brave is the choice we make when we come face-to-face with hard. It’s what we do when we’re staring down pain and heartache, our dreams are blowing away in the harsh winds of change, and we choose to step out toward life and living. It’s brave because there is always an easier, safer option. It’s easier to not be honest and vulnerable when we’re consumed with anxiety and don’t know where to turn. It’s so much easier to say we’re fine when we’re not and to refuse help when accepting it risks admitting we’re weak. But if we want to move forward in and through the raging storm our life has become, we have to step out scared.

Bravery and courage aren’t reserved for soldiers, skydivers, and heroes of the faith. When life stinks so badly we need an industrial-sized air freshener just to get out of bed, bravery can be small daily acts of trust. Brave is saying “I’m having a tough day” when someone who cares asks. It’s trusting God when you’re still angry at him, and it’s saying “I’m scared” for the first time since elementary school. It’s accepting help as unreformed control freaks, and it’s relaxing in a bubble bath with a large glass of wine when your to-do list is as long as a roll of toilet paper.

Choosing brave will be different for each of us, but the ripple effects of each small brave choice will travel through our storms and the darkened skies of those around us, calming the waters as they go. When Becky chooses to share her story, her vulnerability doesn’t just help her process and heal; it travels far and wide, inspiring you and me to do the same. Our decision to share my diagnosis didn’t save lives like Abigail’s decision did, but it set in motion how we’d handle our cancer tsunami and how we’d deal with the next storm that rolled in.

Camouflaging reality with smoke and mirrors is an easier, tempting alternative for sure. Yet as we learn to walk bravely into the hard stuff, we step into a life that would otherwise elude us.

Becky doesn’t regret choosing brave one bit, and nor do I. I bet Abigail didn’t either, and nor will you. I don’t know the specifics of your story, but I do know this: you have a spark buried deep within you crying out for more of what God has for you. Take that hunger and use it to fuel a brave choice today. I’m the one inviting you—encouraging you in my best English accent and offering all sorts of incentives—but at the end of the day, God commands you. How can you say no when he’s promised to go with you?

Choosing brave is the challenging route to a full life, not the easier path to a less-than life. It’s the practice we must exercise first and use most often so it gets easier to walk more fluidly through its increasingly familiar movements. Let’s choose brave together.

I am a Thriver.

I believe life doesn’t have to be pain-free to be full.

I reject the lies of the world about who and whose I am.

I embrace the truth that I am loved, seen, and enough, and that God loves me, isn’t mad, and will never leave.

I’ve got this because God’s got me, and together we can do more than I could ever do alone.

I choose brave, knowing it doesn’t need to be big, just intentional.