I was born with a loaf of brave under my arm that sustains me still.
Brave lifted me out of bed on a dark night, into my mother’s bedroom where the man she brought home, the one three times my size, staggered with his zipper over her passed out frame, like a chalk figure at the scene of an accident. With the authority of Moses to part the Red Sea and save our lives, I stood in flannel nightgown and pointed finger, telling him to leave my house NOW.
Brave stood next to me in line, when I picked my classes, signed the papers, moved into a dorm room and landed my first job. It pushes on the shoulders of fear when standing alone in the line of life decisions.
Brave is the sturdy passenger on road trips to places unknown. As a teenager travelling twelve hundred miles to live with my Dad for a summer. Because maybe that would be better than living with the insecurity that comes with a bottle full of cheap wine. And after the degree, on the road between Tulsa and Phoenix with a car full of the past. A city of dreams shimmers bright under the youthful tent of comfortable unhealthy.
Brave accompanied me down the aisle when fear said, “Don’t do it, what do you know about marriage” and my heart said, “This walk leads to the fullness of life.”
Brave held my hand when I gave birth the first time, and the second, and when someone said, “I’ll hire you to write,” and I had never done that before, been a writer.
Brave reminds me now, when the stats are slow and words seem to echo in an empty canyon some days. That I should write beyond this blog, to share a slice of my brave so you can eat it too.
In all of life, brave is the one who risked it all to save me. If He did this for me, said I can swallow that kind of life too, then what is it that I cannot do with that kind of brave?
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 ESV
Joining in community for Five Minute Friday with the one word prompt: Brave.
(Between making lunches, breakfast and waking sleepy kids, I am not exactly sure how long this took me to write but I do know it took me longer to upload than to write with slow internet this morning. Happy end of the week everyone!)
Tell me, how do you do brave?
And linking with Gathered Thoughts with this quote prompt by Amanda at Life.Edited: