The courage that defines you (living in the small places)

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

LIFE is lived in the small places. Average, ordinary, ho-hum, banal, anything-but-life-like places. Places where we easily miss life rather than embrace it.

It takes courage to live in the small places.

There are large places, of course, and these require courage, too, but it’s in the small places we feel especially alone, afraid, tempted, mischievous, anxious, unstable, impulsive, vulnerable.

Small places are those quiet moments of insignificance where we’re especially susceptible to believing lies about ourselves.

Small places remind us how small and vulnerable we are.

Where:

·        we doubt our purpose.

·        disappointment, guilt or shame reigns.

·        we may face inner erosion and imagine situations of utter destruction.

·        life doesn’t seem to add up or be going the way we planned it to go.

Yet, in the small places is where true spiritual grit is learned.

Where it, as an unlikely spiritual path, a possibility of faith, is first encountered. Where testing of character blurs into experience. Where growth is fortified. Where we become, as the apostle Paul said in Romans 8:31-39, more the conquerors (or super-conquerors) through the facing our small place; neither attacking it in anger or denying it by running from it. By letting it be, and letting that become habit.

See how these small places are so necessary?

See how they’re vital in facilitating our becoming?

The difference-maker between success and despair is courage. Because it’s in the small places we face the imminence of our most urgent threats, it’s there we most need courage. And the courage we need isn’t adorned in the majesty of armour. It’s clothed in circumspect humility, ready to stand.

We’re defined by how humbly we stand in the lonely, small places of life, where courage makes endurance possible.