How life is defined by quiet moments of bravery

After a lifetime of going, the bravest thing I’ve ever done was to stay.

My story starts with the bravery of my parents, when they left everything they knew in California to become lifelong missionaries in France. I was seven when we moved, oblivious to the fact that I should have felt some measure of fear, and instead felt only excitement. 

I was fourteen when my parents sent me to a boarding school for missionary kids in Germany. I left my family behind and moved to a different country without an ounce of fear in my heart, only too grateful to leave difficult French public schools behind. 

And when I turned eighteen and it was time to go to college, I flew to the United States – a country that felt so foreign to me despite what my passport said – and started a new life on my own.

Flashy moves across countries and continents was not bravery on my part, it was simply what had to be done. As is so often the case, my act of bravery happened in a still, quiet moment, with a gentle nudge from the Holy Spirit.

Click here to read the rest of the story, as featured in the “God’s Brave Women” series!