Learning to Surf
What if somebody came along with a grab bag and offered you a chance to pull something out of it for free? Instead of being filled with trinkets or candy, this bag holds something priceless, something transformational. He calls it a Virtue Bag, because it contains every virtue to which a human being can aspire.
He lets you look inside. You see patience, humility, kindness, wisdom, justice, hope, charity, and more. You realize that these are the building blocks of a good life--perhaps even a great life-- because you believe that virtue is the framework for human flourishing. Suddenly, effortlessly, you have the chance to simply reach in and pull out one of these gleaming treasures. Which would it be?
For me it would be courage. Why? Because in the face of conflict, I often wobble. Also because, as C.S. Lewis put it, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”
It seems evident that we are at a testing point of some sort in which boundaries are being blurred and wildly stretched. While some react with outrage, many others are content to keep their heads down and say nothing. Why risk the noxious labels that might be pasted on your forehead like so many scarlet letters should you disagree with the cultural orthodoxies prevalent in your circles and even, perhaps, in your church?
Peer pressure is squeezing the life out of us. But why does it rule us so?
I came upon a bit of wisdom recently, after reading a rather brave essay about African slave traders by the Nigerian writer Adaobi Tricia Obinne Nwaubani. https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-slave-traders-were-african-11568991595
I was curious to know more about her and discovered this quote from A.W. Tozer tucked into her website and described as one she “finds most instructive.”
Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have inward peace? The heart’s fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest. Continue this fight through the years and the burden will become intolerable. Yet the sons of earth are carrying this burden continually, challenging every word spoken against them, cringing under every criticism, smarting under each fancied slight, tossing sleepless if another is preferred before them.”
As I continued to explore Nwaubani’s website, I found a fascinating article https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/opinion/sunday/reform-in-the-name-of-the-father.html she had written for the New York Times about her remarkable father, Chukwuma Nwaubani, who, though running an accounting firm by day, would “embroil himself in one fight for justice after another, causes that were technically none of his business.”
His battles and victories so infuriated the authorities that they retaliated by pushing his wife out of her job in local government.”
Adaobi Tricia goes on to say that her father’s fearless crusade against injustice had angered so many people that “by the time the dead cats, monkey paws and severed heads of chickens started appearing on our front porch, no one was sure exactly who was trying to get rid of him.”
Though a native doctor prescribed using juju* to fight juju, Adaobi Tricia says that her grandmother had another idea. A founding member of the local Assemblies of God church, she simply “stretched her palms over our heads and spoke in strange tongues, interjecting in Ibo to ask Jesus to protect their children, and their children, and their children’s children, forever.”
The jujus were quickly piled up and burned, and the native doctor died the following Tuesday. Since he was the one who had rounded up the items hidden in the yard, everyone believed that the evil forces he’d unearthed had struck him down in revenge.
What a story and what an amazing heritage! And what a reminder of the kind of courage we need to face the cultural moment we’re in.
I’m not pushing for any of us to begin shouting down voices we dislike. There’s already a profusion of bullies on the left and the right. Instead, we need curious, courageous, and principled people, with varying perspectives, who refuse to twist the truth in order to prop up a particular narrative or score a point over the opposition. In other words, we need all hands on deck, including you, no matter the size of your social circle.
Remember that “little god,” Tozer speaks of? As one of my pastors used to say, “If you can’t say, ‘Amen,’ say, ‘Ouch!’” Recognizing our tendency to shrink back when God is calling us to step forward, can open the door for us to lean further into grace so that we can know ourselves and God better.
Though we can’t extract courage from a grab bag, I’m confident we’ll have more of it as we begin to recognize we are children of a very big God. If we know who our Daddy is, we’ll stand taller. So what if we have to swim upstream for a while in a great river of peer pressure. At least most of us will never need to wade through a bunch of juju chicken heads and monkey paws piling up on the porch.
*Juju is the belief that certain objects (called”juju”) can be infused with magical powers. It is practiced in certain West African countries, including Nigeria.