Finding courage

February 13, 2014 by Heather Christensen 2 Comments

Yesterday’s Zero to Hero assignment was to comment on three blogs; today’s assignment is to write a blog post based on one of those comments.

I’m still thinking about “Michael Sam’s Necessary Moment,” written by Holly Anderson on Grantland.  I keep thinking about this:

“Telling the world I’m gay is nothing,” Sam said, . . . comparing coming out to harrowing moments he experienced growing up—more moments of heartbreak than any one human being should have to shoulder.

I commented, “So often people find courage to do something daunting by having faced far worse.”

Since then I’ve been thinking about the hard things I’ve done that give me courage—and strength—to continue to make difficult but necessary choices.

Here are the highlights of my list:

• Coming out to myself, and to my family
• Becoming a minister—when I was raised to believe clergy were wrong, as were women in church leadership
• Making the long journey from my childhood faith to life as a non-theist Unitarian Universalist
• Moving to Alaska, and living here for almost nine years (and counting)
• Choosing to recommit to ministry, and completing the long process of transferring from the Presbyterian Church (USA) to the UUA
• Giving birth to my first child, at age 42, without pain meds

Liesl and I have hard choices to make. Where do we want to live? What kind of work are we looking for? Does Liesl want to stay in aviation? What kind of ministry do I feel called to? And how do we factor Willa’s wellbeing into where we live and what we do for work?

It’s daunting to think about pulling up stakes and starting over. But it helps to remember what we’ve already done.