2024-03-15 A Meditation on Courage

“11 This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, 12 in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.” (Eph 3:11-12 ESV)

Courage to embrace the elusive and the insubstantial-seeming patience, self-forgiveness, dwelling in and near to so much less than what the tangibles would have offered, we are testing the premise of a Holy shade, a rainbow of accusation and implication and errors made, from which we emerge steadfast, knowing our sins are all forgiven, that the shades of ambiguity and the colors of accusation, all do not harm our center of gravity, our inner being, our sense of Victory, emerging Triumphant.

Courage to proceed when at an impasse, is a reminder of how much we labor under the assurances of a trail of bread crumbs. It is a reminder of how much we face a blockage, nothing food for the plaintive laboring eye at least during this hour of prayer. It is a reminder the rainbow is our natural state: we are no longer reputed or slandered or uncovered as immoral, but rather all these accusations and more shall be par for the course, and yes, we can get down on ourselves, thinking to put too much weight on an innocence in all truth that never was ours. We never were so above-the-grade, never so squeaky-clean, never paying-our-debts for crazy mistakes past, even if it can seem that yesterday’s moral outlay is the Cause for today’s sense of composure and purity and above-the-grade Calm.

So we fuss around all feelings of Guilt, and in these do not see the wild ride come to an end: still beloved of the Lord, still fastened in with our seatbelts as reputable and inspiration to the community, still overcomers and moralists of some calm and repeated outlay, iterative, revisions upon revisions, cleaning in the knowledge it takes real sense of culpability truly to appreciate the clean slate offered.

Courage to plug away even as the systems all come up error-ridden and insoluble. Courage to see the furtive, impossible, ventures into the darkness as some miracle ongoing or past, yet see that the lights are still on: the Christian still learns and revises and reforms around a need met, a usefulness studied, a plugged-in willingness to face the unknown and unknowable, the ways sin creeps in, the hope to be found in possession of Someone Else’s rightful upright life. In this we begin to shake off the crust and the vermin-ridden corpse. We are amazingly Okay in this our body and frame. We are peace and joy in believing. We are elevated and new, knowledgeable and authors of a new brand of salvation called Hope.

The courage is the courage to feel utterly amateur in nonetheless big-league investigations: are we moral with our money, or with our male-female relationships, or with our selflessness around the same-sex friendships or relationships as some would venture, with our labors and measurements of the hours; are we innately “good” or are we needful of some daily or regularly paid remittance, some input of good deeds to ensure a certain unknowable equation. An act taken “on faith” rather than because it logically promises anything.