The Courage That Doesn't Look Like Courage

In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch tells his children something they don't yet understand. After the cantankerous old Mrs. Dubose dies, he reveals what they never knew — she had been addicted to morphine for years and had resolved to break free before she died. Every afternoon when Jem read to her, she was enduring withdrawal, shaking and sweating through longer and longer stretches without the drug. She died beholden to nothing and no one.

Atticus turns to his son and says, "I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand." Real courage, he tells Jem, is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

That definition sounds remarkably like faith.

Scripture never promises that obedience will be painless or that faithfulness will look impressive. When Joshua stood at the edge of the Jordan River, the Almighty didn't say, "This will be easy." He said, "Be strong and courageous" — three times — because Joshua would need to hear it three times. Courage isn't the absence of trembling. It's stepping forward while your knees still shake.

Mrs. Dubose never fought a battle anyone could see. But she fought the hardest one — the one inside herself — and she finished free.

Some of you are fighting that kind of battle right now. The Lord sees it. And He calls it courage.