Tonight I was thinking about love, and how if you want to be a good lover at all, you have to have courage.  You have to have courage, because inevitably, in any relationship you have where you care about someone, something is going to happen where either you or the other falls and fails, and you will be faced with a choice about the relationship: to fight for it, or to fold.  And then you will be pressed to decide- do i love this person enough to fight with them?  i heard this idea put in another way: “If you can’t fight with them, you won’t fight for them.”

In reality, love does requires us to fight because love is not soft.  Love is rock hard, standing firm with the truth, and taking stands at every turn.  Love is perpetually vigilant to uphold, to encourage, to affirm, to strengthen, and to nurture.  Love has to be this way, because love does face opposition at every turn.  And you and I get to choose every day whether or not we will love. The harder road is to choose to love, because if we choose to love, in reality we are choosing the less popular of two positions possible.  There is no neutrality to love.  You are either on its side, and will take arms to protect and defend it, or you won’t.  And if you won’t, often it’s because you’ve given up the fight.

Clearly seeing the link between courage and love should be fairly obvious, because the word courage comes from the French word ‘corage’, and the Latin word  ‘cor’.  Both of these words mean heart.  To love, we say you have to have a heart.  To have courage is to also have a heart- to have inner strength.

Great lovers have great hearts. And great hearts are great because they possess a reservoir of inner strength that compels them to fight for those people and things that they love.  Great hearts- hearts capable of great love- are full of courage.

The question then becomes: If I am not a great lover, where must I start to become one? Love requires courage- making choices and taking stances that are risky, and that test our inner strength.  We grow in love only when we risk loving.  This is why we delight in movies when a man makes extravagant gestures and takes great pains through elaborate planning to show a woman he loves her. The movie hero “puts himself out there” for the one he loves.  He doesn’t just declare his love, but he lives it out, showing his beloved he is committed in his heart to her through his actions, which could make him appear like a bozo to the rest of the village.

Fortunately, I think that courage, inner strength, is developed in the same way that we develop muscles in our body.  We develop arm strength through exercise, through the repeated practice of a motion, through the use of our body.  Courage is a product of repeatedly stepping outside of ourselves, letting ourselves be placed in an unfamiliar situation, and then trusting in ourselves and others to “get through it.”  Courage develops as a result of trusting, trying, and  training.  Courage comes from regularly choosing to do the hard thing, the less comfortable thing, the challenging things.

As we develop courage, we develop a deeper capacity to trust ourselves and to trust others. And having faced a range of trials in our pursuit of a courageous heart, we have learned that we do have the strength and the tenacity we need to endure hardships and to fight for what is truly important to us.  We have been trained to handle the wounds of conflict because we know that protecting and restoring relationships with those we love is the most important thing in life we can fight for.  It’s that fight in us, for them, that let’s them know we truly love them.

If you lack courage, you can find and develop it.  You need to.  Courage is the gateway to experiencing deep love in your life, and deep life in your love.  It’s to know that kind of love that we were made.

In life, deep love is the fruit of courage and risk, of fighting and falling.  But courage and love both begin… with trusting, and trying.