October 2012
12South Frothy Monkey Coffee Shop, Nashville, Tennessee
I have a lot of respect for tennis players. Tennis players like themselves a lot. They have a strut. A swag. They may play for a tennis team, but when it is time to swing the racquet, it’s just one. Alone. Don’t hear me saying they are self-centered. That’s not (always) true. What I am saying is that tennis players are confident enough in themselves that they are willing to walk out on a court alone and win. Alone.
I grew up playing soccer. I adore soccer. I’m one girl on a field of eleven. I can play and have an impact, but if we lose the game, I can look around the field like, “Sheesh, girls. What just happened there?” Because, you know, it couldn’t be my fault. Ahem.
I’m about to get my brag on. Prepare yourself.
I’m a good soccer player. In my prime, I could kick a soccer ball with a decent amount of power. Once in high school I slammed one from center field that bounced off the crossbar of the goal with a ping that could be heard anywhere on the field. Coach Moser jumped up and down like crazy. I remember it like it was yesterday.
It’s not often that a coach celebrates a missed goal. So either he was the best coach in the world (because his enthusiasm obviously stuck with me) or he never ever expected me to score so he knew that moment was the best it was going to get.
We’ll go with the idea that he was the best coach in the world.
I loved playing for Coach Moser because he always trusted me to make good decisions on the field, and he relied on me for strong throw-ins and stronger leadership. But when it came time to take penalty kicks, I didn’t do it. He never asked. I never volunteered. (For you non-soccer lovers out there, penalty kicks are when one player takes one shot, unguarded, against the other team’s goalie.) In nineteen seasons of team play, I took zero penalty kicks. Even though I would have scored. Probably. At least once.
I’ve never been afraid to be the center of attention, unless I can fail. Then I’m the one hiding behind, well, anything bigger than me.
Now as an adult, reflecting back on my soccer glory days, I can see the root of the problem. I didn’t love me. I didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t think I could do it. And even more deeply? I didn’t believe I could mess up and still be loved. I didn’t think I could succeed, but I also didn’t have the courage to fail. I had less confidence than any other girl on that field, certainly less than the goalie on the other team. So it was always team play for me — share the wins, share the losses.
But I’m not that girl anymore. I’m not the happy-on-the-outside-insecure-for-days-on-the-inside girl. The lies are gone (for the most part), and instead I see the truth of how God made me and who he made me to be. I don’t fear failure because it doesn’t define me. Neither do my successes. I used to want to hide in the moments that asked me to be brave.
Now I want to take a penalty kick.
My parents have a pond on their property, and all during my growing-up years we fished that pond. In fact, twenty years later, my mom still has the fish I caught with a jiggly plastic worm lure hanging on her wall. (I know. The fact that she still has that ten-pound bass from the 1980s hanging in the living room shows how much she sacrifices lovely décor and the respect of her friends to display her children’s trophies.)
When Dad would take my sisters and me fishing, we had our own poles, oars, and life jackets, and we sang songs. I remember a song about a girl wearing a bikini to school, and I remember singing about Pete’s dragon.
But the song I still sing sometimes is about an ant.
The song is called “High Hopes,” made famous by Frank Sinatra. Apparently my dad wanted a fishing boat full of crooners. I’ll summarize the song for you, only because I can’t sing in these pages. (Honestly, anytime we are together, feel free to request the ant song. I love it. I’ll sing it — you probably won’t even have to ask.) The verses talk of animals that have to do the impossible, such as an ant that has to move a rubber tree plant, a large, treelike potted plant with big, waxy leaves. The chorus goes like this: “But he’s got high hopes . . . he’s got high apple pie in the sky hopes.” And then the song reminds us that anytime we get low and are tempted to let go, we need to remember the ant — “Oops! There goes another rubber tree plant.”*
Ants can’t move potted plants. It’s just not possible.
But what the ant knew is that your muscles don’t always determine what you can do. Your heart does. He believed in himself in a way I often don’t. And because of who his heart said he was, he did things that were impossible. Courage is believing. Then courage becomes action, doing.
One of the beautiful things about Hollywood these days is that some people are sending the right message. While there is an overwhelming amount of godless, discouraging, and sinful images flashing before our minds, we do see a few glimmers of hope.
I like it when TV ads remind us to believe in ourselves and be confident we can do anything we want to do. You’ve seen the ones I’m talking about — an NBC star sits awkwardly on the arm of a couch and says into the camera, “You know those dreams you have? You can do them. Believe in yourself.” And then the NBC “ding ding ding” jingle plays as a star crosses the screen. The more you know, people. The more you know.
Here’s something I know: I shouldn’t believe in me, at least not in the way they think I should. I’ve been me long enough to know that I am not someone to be believed in. I screw up. I hurt people’s feelings. I care too much about some things and not enough about others.
I get lost. I am not perfect. And I don’t want to pour my hope or trust into someone as faulty as myself.
So while I’m grateful for what Hollywood is saying, I don’t think it is totally true.
I believe in the me God made and in the me God can make. I believe he made me on purpose and didn’t make any mistakes when it came to my creation. I believe he is doing a good work in me, and in you. And that though I am flawed, God is loving me and refining me and reminding me that God in me is where I can place my trust.
And that is the place where I find my courage. It’s like if you drive down This Is How God Made Me Road until it intersects with This Is Who God Can Make Me Avenue, there is a pile of courage waiting there. (I swore I wouldn’t do cheesy map-related sentences like this, but can I just this once?)
The better you know you, the better you can find that intersection and the better you can resist temptation to sin or wimp out. I know my tendencies and fears, and I also know my gifts and hopes. It’s where those meet that I often find God cheering for me to make the brave choice.
You have to believe in the One who made you. I am confident in who God made me, but certain I couldn’t do this life — or be brave — on my own.
God is perfect (we are not). He sees the big picture (we do not). He knows everything (we do not). So I choose to believe in this — that I am who I am on purpose, that the One who made me has a purpose and has unconditional love for me and those in my life.
I’m not saying if I had believed these truths in high school I would have been the highest scoring defender in the history of my school’s soccer program. Believing God about who you are doesn’t make you a superhero or an All-American athlete or a rock star.
But if I would have believed these things — really believed them at my core — I would have been brave enough to try. Coach Moser might have called on me for a penalty kick. I might have been willing to take a few shots. To risk failure. To just try.
I became a Christian at a very young age. Five years old. I grew up attending youth group and being really involved in every activity I could — from being in a small group to being in choir to working Mother’s Morning Out in the summers.
Actually, we spent a lot of time hanging around Marietta First United Methodist Church in the summers. We’d bug the youth pastors, film videos for summer camp, hang out in the Sunday school rooms, play basketball in the gym, and walk to lunch at Wendy’s. As a teen, my church friends were my best friends, and most of my favorite memories from that season of life involve those people and that place.
In all the teaching and training and time spent in church, at some point in my younger years, my theology got skewed and I started to believe that Christians somehow got ranked — not based on their sin or their bank accounts, but based on their calling.
You want to be a missionary? You get 5 out of 5 stars. Top notch. Cream of the crop.
You want to be a Hollywood movie star? You get 1 out of 5 stars because, you know, you’ll probably be really rich and famous, and that just can’t be Christian. Or you want to have a normal job at a bank? Okay, that’s 2 out of 5 stars, because you can witness to people in the drive-through. Sorry you aren’t 5 out of 5, but you are still totally a Christian; you just aren’t sacrificing as much as the missionary. God still loves you so much, but you just aren’t as awesome or something.
Every other job or calling falls somewhere in this range. My little confused Christian mind was sure that God ranked people like this. I don’t know where I got this idea. It wasn’t a lesson taught in my tenth-grade Sunday school class or something my parents instructed us on over dinner. But I remember how it felt.
My sister Tatum got saved when she was eleven. I was thirteen then. So I had been on the Jesus train for a while, but it was all new to her. And I’ll tell you what, Tatum had one of those conversions where the old Tatum was really gone and a whole new Tatum was there. It was amazing.
And pretty soon after she got saved, she knew she wanted to be a missionary.
And suddenly, I was a second-class Christian. She was new and I was old hat. She was really brave and I was really normal. I wanted to teach elementary school. She wanted to live in a hut. And most likely, she was going to be really hot and sweaty in whatever mission field she chose.
I hate being hot. I always thought missionaries ended up in really hot climates. So I decided missionary work was not for me and resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to be as good at being a Christian as Tatum was.
I could work as hard as I could, maybe even get 4.5 out of 5 stars if I taught school in really dangerous areas or worked a lot of extra hours, but unfortunately, I’d never be at the top.
Just to be clear. My theology was super off, and this whole line of thinking is wrong wrong wrong. I see that now, but as an impressionable child, seeing certain professions celebrated repeatedly in the church skewed my view a bit. I don’t think it was intentional, but at some point, a conversation going on around me infiltrated my thoughts and bled into my understanding of God and his plan for my life.
As I grew up and began to see Christianity with much more clarity, I learned a few things:
1. Not every place on the planet is hot, so not every missionary is moving to a hot climate. Noted.
2. If we were all missionaries, the world would not work right. Who would pray for them? Financially support them? Give them a comfortable home to return to after a year on the field?
3. God doesn’t ask all of us to be foreign missionaries. He asks us to be us.
4. And who says what you are doing right now right here isn’t God’s work?
That’s why we have to believe that God made us each on purpose. If we are each as unique as the Bible says we are, then our calls to courage are each equally unique.
Tatum’s call to courage at one time looked like moving around the world and sharing about Jesus. My call to courage has looked different. For a while, it was teaching. For a season, it was coaching. Then it was moving and writing and speaking. And there are more calls to come that are specific for me.
But if I embrace them and step into them as they come, I can change the world.
So can you.
We each just have to be brave in our own ways.
Maybe you do want to be a missionary in a foreign country. My friend, that is brave. It really is. But so is being a stay-at-home mom. And so is being a counselor. Or a professional athlete. Or a writer. Or an event planner. Or a technician.
Courage looks different for each of us.
If we want to see God glorified all over the world, we need to be brave enough to see courage in all its different forms. And we need to do the thing. I can’t see into your life to tell you what that thing is today — but I know enough to understand that the brave decisions you make at fifteen affect the brave choices you make at twenty-five — and they are different from the brave moments you face at thirty-five and fifty-five.
To see yourself the way God sees you is the first step in being brave.
If you are seeing yourself the way God sees you, then you can see your strengths and weaknesses. And you can see they are different from mine. You can see the unique ways you are wired and the rare combination of qualities and desires that make you uniquely you.
And you, my friend, have a unique call to be brave.
So when you hear me say, “Believe in yourself,” this is what I want you to think about. Don’t believe in yourself in such a way that you think you can accomplish anything on your own. You can’t. To believe in yourself means to believe that God made you and there is no one like you, that you have a unique call to courage, and that you can do the thing that is staring you in the face. Got it? Let’s list it.
Believing in yourself, as we want to define it here, is actually to believe:
1. God made you on purpose and unique.
2. God has called you to be brave.
3. God will equip you to do it.
To believe in the One who calls you to be brave is to admit that you, like me, are prone to get lost and that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.
We’re going to explore a lot of sides of courage. Like peering at some sort of kaleidoscope crystal, no two people are going to see the same thing when they look for a brave moment. God is that creative.
It’s not your job to see the same refraction of light and color on the wall. It’s your job to be brave enough to look through the kaleidoscope, even if what you see surprises you.
When I think about courage, I think about Gideon. The one from the Bible. (I don’t know another Gideon, but I figured you might, so just to be safe, I wanted to go ahead and clear that up for us. You’re welcome.)
In Judges 6, all the Israelites are misbehaving in serious ways — the kind of ways that separate them from God. The Lord gives them over to their enemies, and they are living in fear — hiding away and being defeated and robbed all over the place. Then the Israelites begin to cry out to God for rescue (classic move, Israelites, classic). God decides to show mercy and deliver them, defeating the other armies by using the Israelite army. And Gideon, this little unlikely guy, is about to have a unique call to courage.
Starting in Judges 6:11, we see Gideon threshing his wheat while hiding out in a winepress (instead of separating the wheat in a normal public place). An angel of the Lord appears and says, “The LORD is with you, mighty warrior.” This statement surprises Gideon because, well, he’s hiding, which is not your typical “mighty warrior” behavior. But the Lord tells Gideon that Gideon is the guy who will lead the army to save Israel from the Midianites. When he hears this, Gideon immediately starts explaining to God why he is the wrong guy for the job — his is the weakest clan and he is the weakest of the weakest clan. But God knows. God knows he’s picked the right guy and tells Gideon as much. (You can read the whole story in Judges 6:11 – 16.)
Poor guy. Do you hear what he is saying? Gideon is the runt of the litter, pretty much. And the runt isn’t supposed to lead.
But that isn’t the way God works.
Gideon is a unique man with a unique call to courage. And if you keep reading, you’ll see that God really pushes Gideon to be brave as he shrinks Gideon’s army from a respectable thirty thousand-plus men to a mere three hundred men. How many on the opposing side? Judges 7:12 says they were “thick as locusts.” Yikes.
You’ve got to read the whole story, because the way the Lord rescues the people and defeats the other armies using just three hundred men is totally fascinating. (Check out Judges 6 – 7.)
And our buddy Gideon? He leads them. The self-labeled runt, who was once too scared to even thresh wheat on a public threshing floor, was now the leader of an army — a victorious army at that. God believed in Gideon. It took some convincing, but Gideon began to believe in Gideon and in who God made Gideon. And then? In that moment? Gideon was brave.
God believes in you too. He believes in all the ways he made you unique. He believes in all the dreams bubbling in your heart. He believes in your ability to take hold of the tiny ledge that is your next call to courage.
I believe in you too. I believe you have picked up this book for a reason. You want to be brave. In your middle place — I like to call it the “knower,” somewhere between your chest and your backbone — you know you want to be brave.
You aren’t the runt. You aren’t a subpar Christian. You haven’t sinned your way out of your calling, and you haven’t lost your chance to make a difference for Christ.
You are one of a kind, made on purpose, deeply loved, and called to be courageous.
*“High Hopes,” music by Jimmy Van Heusen, lyrics by Sammy Cahn.