“So take heart, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told.” – Paul
I have an obsession with courage. This is probably because I often lack it and would like to have more. It is also because over the last six years, the primary virtue that Christians have needed is courage. We live under what often feels like, in Rod Dreher’s words, “soft totalitarianism.” We are told what to think, what to say, and if we step out of line there will be awkward silence or hostile pushback. Our culture remains steadfastly suicidal and rebellious. If you doubt this, head to Starbucks or Fox in the Snow and ask someone:
Is Jesus the only way to be saved?
Should men lead their homes and wives submit to their husbands?
Should we murder babies in the womb?
Can a man become a woman?
Is sex outside of marriage wrong?
Is marriage between a man and a woman?
Even asking these questions would be offensive to some people. To others, you would likely hear responses aiming for compassion but ending in confusion. Yet for millennia, the answers to these questions in the West would have been uncontroversial and self-evident, and some of the questions themselves would have been incomprehensible (see 4&6).
I am not suggesting that you ask those questions of strangers, though it would be interesting! But I am commending courage to think and act in ways that correspond with the teachings of Scripture. Now more than ever, we need courage. The Greek word is θυμός, “thumos.” It means taking heart, being of good courage, to have one’s heart return, or to have one’s heart become hard again. How do we expand our thumos? Here are a few suggestions.
1. Test your limits.
A fictional example of testing oneself: Bilbo Baggins.
Bilbo is a comfort-loving, five meals a day kind of hobbit. His most difficult decisions include where he will take his tea and what to eat for his “second breakfast.” One day a wizard named Gandalf shows up at his doorstep and mentions an adventure. The next week a dozen dwarves stop by, and Gandalf tells the dwarves that Bilbo is indispensable for their impossible adventure. They aim to take back a hoard of treasure that the great dragon Smaug has stolen from the dwarves’ forbears. It is a treacherous journey over mountains and through forests teeming with evil enemies, and then, once arrived, how do you kill a mighty, massive, fire-breathing dragon? Bilbo, lover of food and comfort, has never ventured outside his little village in his life. He has little desire to change his neat, tidy, predictable, pleasurable routine. But when the dwarves doubt his utlity, noting aloud that Bilbo certainly doesn’t appear to have any virtues for the task at hand, something deep within him rises up to prove them wrong, and the next morning, off goes Bilbo, utterly unprepared.
At first, he is inept, incapable and incompetent, and wants nothing more than to be back home:
“I wish I was at home in my nice hole by the fire, with the kettle just beginning to sing!” It was not the last time that he wished that.
But there comes a moment when Bilbo, faced with a terrible situation that he never would have chosen in the dark forests of Mirkwood, becomes a far greater and more courageous person than he ever would have had he not been tested. He is separated from his dwarf friends, his the wizard Gandalf is leagues away, and he finds himself being wrapped in the sticky web of a giant spider after being knocked unconscious. He has no choice but to fight the repulsive spider to the death, and he just barely manages to kill it and free himself. This act of desperate survival effects a change in Bilbo:
“Somehow, the killing of the giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark, without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or anyone else, made a great difference to Mr. Baggins. He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder, in spite of an empty stomach.”
This changes Bilbo’s trajectory. His esteem rises meteorically among the dwarves, after he shows even greater courage in saving them. He becomes more competent and capable. Through a great trial the embers within are blown into a heart filled with thumos.
So try an adventure, like Bilbo. Learn a new skill, run a half-marathon, figure out a “big, hairy audacious goal,” speak publicly. You will grow in thumos.
2. Test your Christian commitment.
Two real life examples: Peter and Paul.
In the book of Acts, these two men dominate the narrative. Peter is the focal point of the first chapters. He is the bold apostle standing before the throngs at the Pentecost festival, preaching repentance and faith in Jesus and seeing thousands convert. He is the one who stands before the authorities and says ““Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19–20). He is the first one to pay a price in physical torture for his unwillingness to be bullied into silence (Acts 5). He is the first one to carry the message to non-Jews, risking the opprobrium of the original Jews for Jesus who were already on his team (Acts 10). Why does he do it all? To successfully carry out a very hard thing – launching the church of Jesus Christ. And he has the courage to lead it.
Paul is a Christian-hater turned Christian. He goes on a tear through the Mediterranean, sharing Jesus with city after city during four missionary journeys (3 voluntary, 1 forced). He suffers greatly (see 2 Corinthians 11). Why? He cannot help the obsession he has with getting the Gospel out – “woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!” (2 Corinthians 9:16). In spite of myriad, massive setbacks and sufferings, Paul had endless stores of courage.
Are we like Peter and Paul? Probably not. But we can test ourselves and see how we measure up in all kinds of ways. Go on a mission trip, give 15% of your income this year, ask the guy on the plane next to you if they know Jesus, talk to a co-worker about the Bible’s teachings about sex or babies. Test yourself, and see if the fire inside grows.
3. Respond as best you can when the poop hits the fan.
Sometimes we are ambushed, unbidden, by a terrible trial, a difficult circumstance, a sudden tragedy. In His divine, mysterious providence, God allows these events in our lives. When He does, and He will, our only choice is how we respond. And if we are able to find the inner courage to respond rightly, we become stronger, more capable, more compassionate, more competent.
Justin Bonanno wrote a great book called The End of Trauma. He explores the nature of courage and resilience in the face of traumatic events, and provides great hope for those who have been through difficulty. I am going to quote him extensively from an interview, where he describes his work with a man named Jed, in Manhattan.
“Jed had an absolutely horrific experience. He was working in a restaurant in New York City, a very high-end restaurant. He was leaving the restaurant about 1:30 AM on a very cold winter evening. He went to cross the street and a sanitation truck came around the corner illegally, knocked him over, pulled him underneath the truck, and all the wheels of the truck on the side he was on ran over his left leg and hip. First the front wheels, then the two sets of double back wheels. Sanitation trucks, when they’re fully loaded, are about 25 tons, and they just crushed his leg to a mass of blood and bone. And he was there on the pavement, screaming wildly. When the ambulance finally got there, they had to lift him up, which was incredibly painful, and take him to the emergency room. They quickly put him into a medically induced coma. He was in the coma for six weeks, and he had nightmares and all kinds of dreams during that time. And they at one point decided there’s no way they’re going to be able to save him without amputating his leg and part of his hip. So the entire leg is gone, part of his hip. I think he had something like 22 surgeries during that time.
About six weeks later, they brought him out of the coma, which is a slow process. His family was extremely worried. How was he going to take waking up and seeing that a huge part of his body was missing? When he became fully conscious, he was, in his words, I think he was just pummeled with memories of this event. And he couldn’t believe all these things he had to process. He knew his leg was gone. He knew what happened to him. And there it was for him to make sense of for the first time. And it took a few days. And then, to his surprise, I think to everybody’s surprise, but above all to Jed himself, he stopped having those memories. He stopped experiencing any kind of intrusive thoughts and nightmarish images. And that was really surprising to him. He basically assumed, ‘if I should have PTSD now, how come this is all stopped? How come I’m basically okay?’
The thing that struck me so much about reading that story is, we live in a world where people say things like they are traumatized by Halloween or they’re traumatized by high school math. The story of Jed, Jed should be the very picture of real trauma. And yet he doesn’t understand himself that way. Jed asks himself, ‘Why am I doing okay?’ Because I think based on popular perception of the way trauma works, he would have imagined himself to be traumatized. So why was he doing okay?
Jed wanted to know so deeply that he ended up becoming a clinical psychologist. He had been dabbling in psychology, taking some classes, but after the accident, he decided to go back full time. And he earned a master’s degree, then he earned a PhD, and he actually came to work with me, which is how I met him. His case illustrates the fact that so many people are, in fact, exposed to these highly aversive events, horrifying, life-threatening, the kind of events you would never in a million years want to go through, and they come out basically okay. And the interesting thing is they don’t know why. And part of what I’ve been trying to do in my own work is to work that out.
It’s a very common misnomer, a very common mistake to think, “I’m traumatized now.” We’ve tried to understand trauma response for a long time and we finally came up with some key components. One is a mindset, a way of thinking, an attitude, a conviction that, ‘I’ll deal with this. I’ll get through this. I’ll do what I have to do and I’ll get through it.’ And that’s a simple way to think. We can break it down into something we call ‘confidence in coping.’ The second is to do hard things. I know a guy who runs a kind of an obstacle course race in the cold, where people have to climb up walls and then dive in ice cold water, and they do it outside, and then climb up a muddy hill and all these different things. And there are a bunch of people doing this, like maniacs, and they’re trying to get to the end. And they end up helping each other, and it’s exhilarating. You basically feel like, I can do this.”
Bonnano’s research tells us that if we:
- have hope that we will get through the difficulties;
- if we test ourselves;
- and if we have other people to rely on and help us, then we can overcome the hard things we endeavor to tackle and that we have to endure.
In other words, we will grow in courage.
4. Conclusion – internal and external thumos
In Acts 27, Paul is being shipped to Rome, and while they are out at sea they are caught up in a terrible storm. For weeks they are at the mercy of the northeaster, its winds so violent that they are finally forced to throw the cargo overboard, fearful that the ship will sink under the weight. They hadn’t eaten in weeks, and the unchosen trial they were enduring was terrifying. But Paul tells them that an angel has told him that they will all live, though they will lose the boat. He says in 27:22, “I urge you to take heart.”
But in the very next chapter, Paul arrives in Rome and is feeling a little gun shy. He is timid. It isn’t the first time, believe it or not. But he meets believers and they put courage back into him Luke uses a different but related word, the Greek tharsos.
On seeing them, Paul thanked God and took courage (Acts 28:15).
From here, he is ready to share the Gospel with all who come to see him on house arrest. Similarly, the church in Philippi brings Paul the outer courage he needs to continue to be faithful to Christ while in prison:
I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon, so that I too may be cheered by news of you (Philippians 2:19).
Paul needed to give courage, and he needed to receive it. We all need it. If we are going to be the kind of people we admire and want to be, it will take lots of thumos. We can help each other, as we run the race marked out for us by God, giver of all good things, including courage.
Pastor David Milroy