There was a moment — maybe you remember it — when your hands were shaking, and you did the thing anyway. You made the call. You opened the door. You told the truth to one person, just one, and you were trembling so hard you almost talked yourself out of it. Nobody standing outside that moment would have called it heroic. There was no applause, no dramatic music, no witness to hand you a medal. But something happened in that trembling moment that deserves a name — and the name is courage. The gap between what courage looks like from the outside and what it costs on the inside is enormous. This month, we are going to close that gap together.
The Courage We Were Never Shown
Every image we were handed of bravery growing up was loud. It was a warrior on a battlefield, a hero running toward fire, someone who never flinched, never wavered, never showed the white of their eyes in fear. What we were almost never shown was the courage that looks like leaving with nothing but the children and a trash bag. The courage that looks like making the first call to a hotline while your hand shakes so hard you can barely press the numbers. The courage that looks like choosing to stay alive on a day when staying felt like the hardest thing you had ever attempted.
Those versions of courage — the sustained, daily, exhausting, invisible kind — are harder than any battle charge. The warrior on the field has adrenaline and witnesses and a clear enemy and a beginning and an end. The survivor has none of those things. She fights the same battle every morning when she opens her eyes, with no guaranteed end date, no cheering crowd, often no one who fully understands what it has taken. And yet she rises. And yet she continues. And yet she shows up to one more day.
Every single one of those decisions counts. The version of courage you have been living is not a smaller or lesser version of bravery. It is one of the most demanding forms that courage has ever taken. Name it that way. Hold it that way. It is not in spite of the fear that you were brave — it is through the fear. That is precisely what makes it courage.
What God Said to the Afraid
Joshua 1:9 is one of the most repeated verses in scripture: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” I want to sit with something in that verse that we almost always rush past. God does not say: stop feeling what you feel. He does not say: the fear is a sign that something is wrong with you. God’s command — “do not be afraid” — is not a criticism of your fear. It is a provision for it. It is God looking directly at someone who is afraid and saying: I am with you anyway.
Then Isaiah 41:10 layers four extraordinary verbs onto that presence: “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” The Hebrew word behind “uphold” — tamak — does not mean cheering from a distance. It does not mean watching sympathetically from across the room. Tamak means to hold from underneath. Like hands placed beneath someone who is about to fall and cannot catch themselves. God is not watching your trembling from above. He is positioned below, sustaining, holding the weight of you when you cannot hold it yourself.
Your courage is not self-generated. It never was. Every brave thing you have done — every trembling, terrifying, costly decision — was held by hands that were already beneath you. You did not carry it alone. You were carried, and you also walked. Both of those things are true at the same time. That is the mystery of God-held courage, and that is what this month is about.
Naming Your Courage
I want to introduce a practice I call the Courage Acknowledgment — not as a performance, not as something to share publicly if you are not ready, but as an act of honest witness between you and the God who already knows what you have done to survive. The practice is simple: name one courageous thing. From the past week, the past year, the past decade. Something no one else may have seen. Something you have never had words for before.
“I got out of bed.” That counts. “I told someone the truth.” That counts. “I called the hotline and hung up before anyone answered — but I called.” That counts. “I survived another day when part of me did not want to.” That counts immeasurably, and there is no ledger more important than the one in which God has recorded it.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month — the month when the world turns its face toward what usually goes unseen and says: we see you. Purple is everywhere this month — in windows, on ribbons, on social media — as a collective act of witness. And this space, this podcast, this community, is part of that turning. Here, your courage is not incidental to the conversation. It is the conversation. You are not a cautionary tale or a statistic. You are a woman who trembled and moved anyway. That is the truest definition of brave that I know.
“She didn’t wait until she stopped trembling to do the brave thing. She trembled, and she moved — and God was already beneath her, holding her weight before she even took the step.”
I remember the first time I did something courageous with shaking hands. I did not feel brave in the moment — I felt terrified, uncertain, and entirely alone. What I learned over time is that those hands were not evidence of weakness. They were evidence of something real happening, something costly and holy. Bravery is not the absence of shaking. It is the decision to move anyway. If you showed up here today — to this page, to this word, to this month — something in you already knows that. I see you. God has you. And I am right here.
Monica
Listen to the Full Episode
The companion episode to this post goes even deeper. Join Monica for the full opening prayer, a grounding, centering breathwork practice, the complete Joshua 1:9 and Isaiah 41:10 scripture reflection, and the guided Courage Acknowledgment healing practice that you can return to any time you need to remember who you are. Find Monica in Daylight wherever you listen to podcasts — Episode 1 of the October 2026 series is live now. Come as you are.
