the war is where you are

“Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.”

Audre Lorde

“Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong.”

1 Corinthians 16:13

I recently watched the movie Small Things Like These. It’s based on an award-winning short novel and centers around a man named Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in a small Irish town in the 1980s. He lives a quiet, simple life, delivering fuel, raising five daughters, and loving his wife. Nothing about his life seems courageous or heroic. He’s not chasing influence or greatness. He’s kind. He works hard. He’s content with his lot.

But one cold December day, while delivering coal to a convent-run girls’ school, he stumbles upon something horrifying: a teenage girl locked in a coal shed. Shivering, filthy, and forgotten.

She’s part of the Magdalene Laundries, a real, hidden system where “fallen” girls were imprisoned under the guise of religious reform. It was abuse wrapped in piety. Everyone in town knew: the priests, the politicians, the neighbors. They all looked the other way.

In the film, you watch an agonizing inner conflict take place in Furlong's heart. Everything around him tells him to simply go on with his life. Everyone around him tells him to leave it alone. Everyone believes the church knows best. Besides, it wasn’t his daughter, his job, his fight. He should shut the door, do his job, and drive away.

Yet, everything in him tells him this is the moment he must stand up as a man.

Somehow, he knows if he doesn’t act, a part of him will die. So, he goes back to help the girl and confront the system of abuse, not with fanfare, but with faithfulness. He decides to risk his reputation, disrupt the peace, and lose his place in the community.

The reason the movie resonated so deeply with me is that it touched on something we all know but often overlook. The things we are called to fight and fight for are right in front of us, buried under the normalcy of life in a broken world. Furlong didn’t get to choose the time, the arena, and the manner of the conflict, but he fought where he was standing. The battle was brought to him. He had to fight where he was.
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We often imagine courage as something reserved for grand, heroic moments. Men’s movements have conditioned us to believe that Braveheart, Gladiator, and John Wick moments await us. We fantasize about great evil being overcome in a great way by great good. But Hollywood sells dreams; it doesn’t build men in real life.

The real war will be won where you are. Most of the truly heroic stuff we will do in our lives will be invisible to others. The battles we face will likely take place in courageous obscurity.
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Caleb is a young man in our youth group. He has gotten a vision for God and a passion for the kingdom. When I visited our youth camp last summer, he was in the front row, on his face, seeking God. But Caleb goes to a Christian school where none of the other kids his age respond in worship during chapel. Some don’t even sing or worship at all. They attend, but they don’t express. It’s a formal culture, and the emphasis is on academics, not encounter. Caleb had gone along with this for a while. Passion at church, passive at school.

I bumped into Caleb's dad last week. It was a moving conversation. He shared that Caleb had an inner moment of resolve, recognizing that Jesus was worthy of passionate devotion in all environments, not just some. So he blocked everyone out, closed his eyes, lifted his hands, and began to worship in chapel. One kid standing alone, hands raised in the air, breaking his bottle before God. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but when you are in the formative years of your adolescence, and the only one taking a bold stand for God, it costs a lot. It requires real and biblical courage.

His dad shared how proud he was to attend a chapel and see his son as the only one with his hands raised, caught up in worship. A young man of passion in a sea of passivity. They won’t make a documentary about this, but it’s the development of this kind of conviction in the hearts of young men that our world is aching for today.
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The war is where you are, not where you wish it could be.
What is happening around you that God is calling you to do something about?

My friend Brett is a pastor in Canada. His kids were in the local high school when an outside group came in to teach a radical inclusion seminar on sexuality that normalized porn, was horrifically graphic, and wildly inappropriate. Rather than turning the other way, he did something. He drafted an open letter, confronted the school administration, and refused the sexual indoctrination of the kids. His post gained massive traction, stopped the indoctrination, and thousands of others thanked him for having the courage to bring to light what others had left in the dark.

He fought where he was, with what was needed in the moment. Maybe not dramatic, but actually heroic.
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Men, the war is where you are. It’s in your actual life.
What is happening in your marriage that you need to fight with or for?
What is happening in your kids’ lives that you need to fight with or for?
What’s happening with your friends that you need to fight with or for?
What’s happening in your church that you need to fight with or for?

Fighting on the screen is vicarious warfare.
Fighting for what’s in front of you is actual warfare.

The stakes are high where you are. The victory is more beautiful in real life than we have been led to believe. The hard-fought hallelujah will always mean more than the dramatic event in the distance.

You can’t fix everything in our world, but you can fight with your whole heart where you are.

With you in the pursuit to cultivate obscure courage in our actual lives.

Cheers.

Jon.