Five Minute Friday: Brave

Five Minute Fridays: this is where a brave and beautiful bunch gather every week to find out what comes out when we all spend five minutes writing on the same topic and then sharing ‘em over here.

This Week: Brave

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Brave is an elegant, ephemeral thing. You’d think it’d be big and bold like craggy rocks – and maybe it is for some – but I think brave is a quiet thing inside that endures. I see brave all around me; every day in real life and online other small places in between. Soul sisters making brave choices; staking brave claims in brave new ways.

When she is the silent strength behind her man; praying him through the path into the next job; the next best thing that God has planned for him – she is brave. When she does it while raising kids; filling bellies; clothing backs; juggling joy; and hiding her own tears time after time, she is brave.

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When she hears the diagnosis; straightens her shoulders; bears up under it with so much joy and confidence in her God that it spills over; amazes the world around her; and sets them to wonder, she is brave.

When, after one too many nights of a knock-down drag-out that leaves a mark that make up and another story won’t cover, and she decides to walk away to freedom and a new life – no matter that she can’t see through the dark of the night, she is brave.

When she feels the mother-call deep in her heart and knows she isn’t done and flies halfway around the world to discover daughters in another land and brings them home to a new life and new destiny, she is brave.

When she wakes up in the morning and already feels the awful ache that never really left – never really stopped for as long as she can remember with this new evolution of a chronic disease that no one seems to understand – and gets up to make breakfast and welcome the day anyway, she is brave.

Brave is an infinite line running off into the horizon, and the will to follow it where it leads. Brave is embracing a dream still forming and committing to seeing it to life someday. Brave is taking a breath and waking up to your life in spite of circumstance, in spite of difficulties, in spite of setbacks and trusting that the will of God will never lead you where the grace of God cannot keep you.

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He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust.Psalm 91: 1-2

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