Everyday Courage, Part 2: It's Complicated
At a Glance
It's complicated isn't a reason. It's complicated is an observation.
Andy Stanley argues that the same instinct that makes us rename jealousy as 'concern' and greed as 'frugality' makes us rename fear as 'it's complicated'—especially around forgiveness. Until we correctly diagnose fear as fear, we can't move past it, and forgiveness, rightly understood, is itself an act of everyday courage.
- We routinely rename fear—jealousy, greed, anger, 'it's complicated'—because admitting fear feels too costly to our self-image.
- 'It's complicated' is an honest observation about circumstances, but it is never a legitimate reason to keep avoiding what courage requires.
- Forgiveness is not passive relief but a courageous, unilateral act: canceling a real debt independent of whether the offender ever responds.
Exposition
The mirror problem
We rename what we can't bear to admit about ourselves
Before you can address an emotion, you have to stop giving it a more flattering name.
Andy Stanley opens by naming a pattern he says is universal, not religious: jealousy, greed, and anger are easy to spot in others but nearly impossible to see in the mirror, so we substitute softer words before the truth can 'ding our conscience.' He tells on himself—years of insisting to a counselor, 'Steve, I'm not angry, I'm just frustrated,' until Steve asked what the actual difference was. 'I thought about it and I said, well, it sounds better... but there's no difference. It's the same thing.' This sets up his real target: fear gets the same camouflage treatment, especially in relational situations where there's no obvious physical danger to justify the word.
It's complicated is an observation, not a reason
Complexity describes your circumstances; it cannot substitute for a reason not to act.
Every act of courage worth telling stories about—Rosa Parks, the signers of the Declaration of Independence—happened inside genuinely complicated circumstances; complication was never absent, it was just not treated as disqualifying. Stanley pushes this as a diagnostic: 'If a potential outcome is keeping you from what you know you should do, that's fear.' He suggests a thought exercise—say your excuse out loud, following the 'if... then' logic ('if I do this, then she will probably...')—until you 'bump into the real culprit, which is fear.' The delay itself compounds the problem: 'the longer you wait, the more complicated it's gonna get.'
Forgiveness reframed as a courageous transaction
Canceling a debt someone actually owes you
Forgiveness isn't pretending no debt exists; it's the courageous choice to cancel a debt that is real.
Stanley applies the whole framework to forgiveness, which he says we almost never associate with fear because we mislabel what's actually holding us back. He is deliberately direct: 'It's time to forgive... to confront the giant that continues to whisper and to make his or her or its way into all of your most important relationships.' His key move is redefining forgiveness itself: 'Forgiveness isn't a declaration of you're not guilty. Forgiveness is simply a declaration of you are guilty... but you are choosing... to stop holding it over them.' Waiting for an apology that will likely never come, he says, is 'like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.'
Forgiveness as unconditional, modeled by Jesus
Not because they deserve it, but because of whom you follow
Your forgiveness is never actually contingent on the other person—it depends only on whom you're choosing to follow.
Turning to Peter's question—'how many times shall I forgive... seven times?'—Stanley notes Jesus's answer, 'not seven times, but seventy-seven times,' is heard as an unlimited number, followed by a parable underscoring God's own extravagant forgiveness. He leans hard on Paul's instruction to 'get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger... forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you'—stressing the phrase is 'just as,' not 'because they deserve it.' The clinching example: 'Jesus forgave the men who nailed him to the cross... He did not need anything from them to forgive.' Forgiveness, then, is never contingent on the offender's awareness, apology, or change.
Scripture engaged
Devotional
There is a particular exhaustion in defending a word we know isn't quite true. We say frustrated when we mean angry, careful when we mean afraid to be generous, complicated when we mean I don't want to do the courageous thing. The mirror is patient with us in a way that is almost cruel—it keeps showing us the same face until we finally call it by its name.
Fear is patient too. It doesn't need to win an argument; it only needs us to keep calling it something else. It will happily let us believe our situation is uniquely tangled, uniquely unprecedented, uniquely unlike Rosa Parks or the men who signed their names to treason and hope. But every history worth telling was complicated at the time it was lived. The complication was never the obstacle. The fear wearing complication's clothes was.
And nowhere does this disguise work harder than at the door marked forgiveness. We wait for an apology that isn't coming, an admission that isn't forming, a regret that isn't arriving—and call the waiting patience, or wisdom, or self-protection. Meanwhile the debt we're holding keeps compounding interest in us, not in them. Somewhere beneath the waiting is simply: I'm afraid of what letting go will cost me.
What might it mean to stop drinking that poison? Not because the hurt was small, not because the debt wasn't real—but because a strange kind of gift was already given at a cross where no apology was extended and none was required. That is the courage on offer: not to feel less, but to owe nothing to fear any longer.
Reflection prompts
- What word have you been using to soften something that, if you said it plainly, you'd have to call fear?
- If you said your excuse out loud—'if I do this, then they will...'—what would you actually hear yourself admit?
- What do you believe forgiving someone would cost you, and has that cost ever been honestly written down and examined?
Closing prayer
Father, this lands differently in each of us—some of us dealt with this long ago, some are thinking of someone right now who needs to hear it, some feel like their mail's been read. Give us wisdom to know what to do with what we've heard, and courage to do it. Let us no longer be slaves to the fear our Savior came to free us from. Help us see clearly what's in the mirror, name it rightly, and find the courage to forgive. In Jesus' name, amen.