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Out of the Box
A Conversation on Courage

by Kerri Anderson

In 1993 I packed whatever I could fit into my tiny Toyota hatchback and moved from my home state of Kansas to Illinois. I was less than halfway through my undergraduate degree, and I still had no idea what I wanted to major in. (Actually, I had several different ideas.) I didn't know where I would live or how I would support myself. I was taking a chance and putting my future on the line. Was I courageous in making this move — or perhaps only foolish?

In 1998, after eleven years, I finally finished my undergraduate degree. I had $10,000 in student-loan debt, and I decided to enroll in a graduate program beginning a few months later. Again, was I being courageous? Single-minded? Or just plain stupid?

I think that before we can make any kind of judgment about whether or not a particular act is courageous, we need to look below the surface and try to discover the motivation for that act, to see what story it's a part of. As I have contemplated the meaning of courage and looked for definitions in various books, I have come to an interesting conclusion: a person cannot be courageous without first feeling fear. You might say courage must be born from fear. This is fascinating to me because it means that I do not need to fear fear. Instead, I can learn from it and use it to further develop my knowledge and love of God, myself, and others.

We are often trained as Christians that fear is sinful, period. In contrast, Dan Allender and Tremper Longman write in their book The Cry of the Soul that the issue is not whether or not we have fear, but what and whom we fear (92). Do we fear the world, or do we fear God? Release from a destructive fear and the move into courage involves feeling that fear, discovering what it is we fear, and then bringing it before God.

While it might seem that my move from Kansas to Illinois in 1993 was courageous, and while such a move might in fact be courageous for many people, I have to admit that courage was not involved in my case. The move in 1993 did not require courage of me, because I did not fear it. I moved because I felt the urge for a change. Likewise, my decision to enter a graduate program in 1998 after spending so much time and money to complete my undergraduate degree came from my need for teacher's certification. I did not fear entering graduate school, so it was not an act of courage for me.

Now, three years later, I have a master's degree in special education and am in my third year of teaching. When, for the purpose of writing this essay, I asked myself, "Was I courageous in graduate school?" I found that I first needed to ask, "What did I fear?" The answer came to me immediately. What took, and still takes, the most courage for me in graduate school has been to leave it: to be no longer as a child, no longer to be told to a great extent what to do, how to do it, and what to think. Now I must make decisions and take responsibility for myself. I no longer have someone pulling me along, showing me the way, and I do not have a group of constant companions in the same boat. I am not sure of the ground I walk on. To a great extent, I have to make my own path.

Don't get me wrong — I skipped across that stage and snatched that diploma with feet as light as air, my heart singing in ecstasy. But somehow the drastic change from being a student to being a teacher has shaken me to the core more than anything I've encountered before. It takes tremendous courage for me to get up and get out of bed some days. I've had two or three mornings when I've stood in the shower sobbing, telling God and the world, "I can't do this!" Sometimes I feel as if I'm being physically stretched as I grow into this new way of life. And it hurts.

I've lived on my own for a number of years. I worked my way through school, moved to new places and met new people, and ever since I could talk my motto has been, "I'll do it myself." It surprised me, therefore, that I was so afraid to begin doing what I had spent three years of graduate school preparing to do. Frankly, it worried me, too. "What's wrong with me?" I wondered. "Why can't I do this job I've wanted and worked so much for — and that I believe I was led by God to pursue?"

As I thought about my problem, through prayer, contemplation, and journal writing, I began to discover that what I feared was stepping out of the safe, comfortable box I had made for myself in all my years of schooling. School was familiar. I excelled at it, I understood it, I knew how to behave in it and what to expect from it. To some extent, not consciously but subconsciously as I maintained my box, I was saying, "Who needs God? Who needs courage? I can do it myself quite well, thank you." As a teacher, I was suddenly on new, unexplored ground — exciting, certainly, but at first so frightening that I was almost paralyzed.

About these boxes: we are all familiar with them, those mental, emotional, and sometimes even physical barriers we put up to enclose something in order to keep it from getting out of hand, or to enclose ourselves to keep us safe. (Did someone say "cage"?) We've heard a phrase about putting God in a box or letting God "out of the box." It means that we limit our concept of him to things we can understand and do not fear, things we can control. We all have our own boxes, things we refuse to deal with, experiences we refuse to try. Sometimes we put God in a box, and sometimes we put ourselves there.

In one of my undergrad courses I saw a short film, Un Jardin Public (1955), starring the accomplished mime Marcel Marceau. Its message struck me so deeply that I have never forgotten the images. I guess that even then I knew I had trouble getting out of the box and living courageously. In the film, Marceau discovers a beautiful garden. He delights in the sights, smells, and feel of the various plants there. Then a group of children come along, and they want to enjoy the garden too. But they trample the flowers as they play, they pick them and in general mess them up. Marceau becomes angry, chases the children away, and builds a wall to keep the children out. Soon he has built four walls. But the birds still come and eat the fruit and do the messy things that birds do, and Marceau again becomes angry, because "his" garden is being disrupted. So he puts a ceiling on his box. At first Marceau delights that the garden is now all his, but then the flowers and plants begin to die from lack of sunlight, water, and air. Marceau becomes lonely because no one visits him anymore. He chips a small piece of one wall away, and looks cautiously, hopefully out. He chips a little more, and then, more courageously, reaches out his hand. The children see him and run to him. He greets them with joy, and with their help the box is destroyed and everyone, including Marceau, enjoys the garden more fully than before.

So how do I live courageously in spite of my fear? I cry. I pray. I try to obey. I sit on my bed, or stand in the shower, and tell God every reason why I simply cannot go to work today. I tell him what I fear, and I try to understand why I fear it. And then I am quiet. I try to listen to his response. Sometimes I sense gentle reminders of his presence and promises that he will be with me in everything I do. Sometimes I sense that I must be strong, that I must face these new experiences because they contain something important, something I must learn in order to know and serve him better. Sometimes I sense nothing, only silence, and I know that that itself is an answer, that I already know what to do: have faith and move forward, do the job that has been entrusted to me. Eventually I move and do what I fear in spite of that fear. I'll admit that often my conscious motivation to get moving is the need to earn a paycheck. But I think courage is also involved, as well as faith in and love for God and the students I serve. As I tear down the box and live more and more courageously, I become better equipped to handle what life brings. I have to leave the box in order for God to be able to help me live outside it.

It's often a daily struggle, sometimes even moment by moment. Remember Eustace in C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader? Eustace had turned into a dragon and then couldn't rip his dragon skin off. Aslan had to rip the hide off for him, and afterward Eustace felt raw. The water he bathed in, the water that enclosed him and healed him, stung him terribly. But afterwards, he was a real boy again, perhaps more real than he was before. That's pretty much how I sometimes feel: raw, without defenses. Yes, God is my defense, but he's not always warm and fuzzy these days. These experiences that I encounter every day as a teacher and as a real adult, these experiences which enclose me as the water did Eustace, are my own baptism into a life of greater faith. I am raw, without defense, but I know God walks beside me and, because my defenses are gone, I can know him better. Knowing him gives me joy and the desire to tear down anything between me and him.

To a great extent, the essence of my life and my relationship with God has been tearing down the boxes I've built to protect myself and allowing God to be as big as he wants to be — as big as he is. Sometimes, like Marceau, I am able to tear down a particular box on my own or with others' help. Sometimes, like Eustace, God must free me. My goal is to allow God access to as much of me as he wants and to follow him wherever he chooses to lead me. I finished graduate school just a short while ago, and the courage to leave it behind, to trust what I know and begin using it, still eludes me sometimes. But I am learning. Each day I step a little further away from the box, and another part of the wall falls down. I believe I am growing, that each time I move forward and act courageously I become a better teacher than before, and I am then capable of doing more. I hope to avoid building a new box for God or for myself.

The exciting thing about life with God is that he does exist outside any box. We can learn something new about him every moment, and he is worth knowing. We have to be ready, though. As soon as we encounter God outside a box, as soon as we allow him to be more than we can grasp, he will definitely be more than we have ever known or could ever conceive. 

Kerri Anderson graduated from the University of Kansas in 2001 with a Master's degree in Special Education. She currently teaches students with severe and multiple disabilities near Lawrence, Kansas.

This essay is part of the "Pursuing Virtues" series at FollowingChrist.org.