A Heart Full of Courage
Facing life with bold belief.
Courage, Fatima Al-Rashidi had discovered, was rarely the dramatic thing people described in books.
It was not the sudden surge of adrenaline before a great moment. It was not the triumphant decision made in a single breath. It was something smaller and more persistent than all of that: the quiet, daily choosing to keep going when stopping would be easier, to speak when silence would be safer, to believe when doubt had made a very convincing case for itself and was waiting politely for her agreement.
She was forty-five, a Jordanian-Canadian architect living in Toronto, the daughter of parents who had left Amman in the late eighties with two suitcases and a conviction that the life waiting for them on the other side of the Atlantic was worth the cost of reaching it. They had been right, as it turned out, but they had not known that when they left. They had simply been brave enough to go without knowing.
Fatima had inherited the architecture and the stubbornness in roughly equal measure. She was a woman of precise vision and considerable drive, with a professional reputation built over twenty years on the quality of her work and her willingness to take on projects other firms found too complicated, too constrained, or too underfunded to bother with. She specialised in community spaces: libraries, health centres, affordable housing developments, the buildings that served people who did not always have the luxury of caring what their buildings looked like but deserved them to be beautiful anyway.
She had come to faith fifteen years earlier, quietly and without ceremony, through a series of events she found difficult to explain in any language except the one that had no obvious secular translation. She had simply arrived at God the way some people arrive at a place they had been heading toward without knowing: recognising it as familiar before they had ever been there.
Her faith was woven into her life in the unobtrusive way of something load-bearing: not always visible but always structural. It shaped what she chose to work on and how she treated the people she worked with and the way she made decisions when the decisions were hard.
The decision that required the most courage she had ever summoned came in the autumn of her forty-fourth year.
She had been offered a partnership at the firm where she had worked for eleven years. It was the professional arrival she had been working toward, a recognition of everything she had built, a stability she had earned and genuinely wanted.
She had also, over the previous two years, developed a fully designed plan for something she had never told the partners about: a not-for-profit architecture practice, staffed by volunteer licensed architects, that would provide pro bono design services to community organisations and social enterprises that could not afford professional fees. The buildings that needed the most thoughtful design, in her experience, were consistently the ones with the least money for it. She had been quietly, persistently angry about that for years, and the anger had gradually and productively become a blueprint.
The two things could not coexist. She understood that with the practical clarity of someone who had done the arithmetic. Accepting the partnership meant shelving the practice, at least for the foreseeable future, possibly permanently. Launching the practice meant declining the partnership, walking away from the financial security and professional recognition she had worked two decades to reach, and stepping into something with no guaranteed income, no established infrastructure, and an idea that most sensible people in her industry would describe as admirable and impractical in roughly equal measure.
She spent three weeks thinking about it with the focused thoroughness she brought to everything. She made spreadsheets, which was her natural language for serious decisions. She talked to Khalid, her husband, who was a steady and perceptive man who had learned over twenty-two years of marriage that his role in Fatima's decision-making was not to guide but to witness, and who listened with the patient attentiveness that had always been one of his great gifts.
She prayed about it, seriously and consistently, in the way that serious decisions require: not asking God to confirm the choice she had already made but genuinely presenting both doors and asking which one she was supposed to walk through.
The answer did not arrive as a clear directive. It rarely did, in her experience. It arrived more like a gradual clarifying: a consistent, persistent interior orientation toward the practice that did not diminish with time and could not be argued away with spreadsheets, no matter how carefully constructed.
She talked to her friend and mentor, Dr. Rania Haddad, a Lebanese-Canadian professor of architecture at the University of Toronto who had known Fatima for sixteen years and whose opinion she trusted more than almost anyone's. Rania was direct in the way of people who respect you too much to be anything else.
"Tell me what you are afraid of," Rania said, over coffee in her office on a grey October afternoon.
Fatima told her. The financial risk. The professional perception, the possibility of being seen as someone who had walked away from success for an idea that did not work. The specific, uncomfortable fear that she might be using her faith to dress up a decision that was simply reckless, that she might be calling courage what was actually naivety.
Rania listened to all of it. Then she said: "And if it works? If it becomes exactly what you have designed it to be? What does that look like?"
Fatima described it. She had described it before, in the privacy of her own imagination, but saying it out loud to another person gave it a different quality. The offices in community spaces rather than commercial towers. The architects doing the best work of their professional lives on the projects that needed them most. The buildings: community centres, hospices, youth facilities, women's shelters, designed with the care and the craft that their occupants deserved and had never been able to afford.
Her voice had a quality in the describing that her voice did not have when she talked about the partnership.
Rania noticed. "That is your answer," she said simply.
Fatima looked at her.
"The fear is real," Rania said. "The fear is also not a reason. Fear and courage are not opposites, Fatima. They are the same moment, experienced from two different angles. The courageous person is not the one without fear. It is the one who feels it completely and goes anyway."
She drove home that evening with Joshua 1:9 arriving in her mind with the quiet forcefulness of something she had not been looking for but needed: "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."
Be strong and courageous. It was a command, which implied it required an act of will. Not a feeling to wait for but a posture to choose. The strength and the courage were being asked of her before the outcome was visible, before the path was clear, before the risk had been removed.
Be courageous because I am with you. Not: be courageous because the circumstances are favourable. Because I am with you. The presence was the ground. Not the plan.
She declined the partnership on a Thursday morning and launched the practice on a Monday six months later.
The six months between those two dates were the most frightening of her professional life and some of the most clarifying. She had conversations she had not expected to have, found allies she had not known were waiting, and encountered a level of practical difficulty that would have been discouraging if she had not been paying close enough attention to also notice the specific, repeated, unmistakable ways that doors opened precisely when she needed them to.
A retired architect she had met once at a conference contacted her, unprompted, three weeks after she announced the practice on LinkedIn, and offered to volunteer two days a week. He had been looking for something exactly like this for two years. He brought three other retired colleagues with him.
A community foundation she had not approached came to her, having heard about the practice through a mutual contact, with funding for the first operating year.
Her first client was a women's shelter in the east end of the city that had been waiting four years for a renovation they could not afford to design properly. She walked through the space with the shelter's director, a formidable woman named Paulette, and spent three hours listening to what the women who used the space needed it to do for them.
She designed it over four weeks, with more care than she had given anything in years, and when the renovation was completed Paulette called her and said: "The women say it feels like someone thought about them. Like they mattered enough for someone to think about them."
Fatima sat with that for a long time.
That was the architecture she had always wanted to make. The kind that told the person inside it that they were worth caring for. Not because the building was expensive or elaborate. Because someone had paid attention.
She had been paying attention her whole career. She had finally found the work that deserved it most.
Her daughter, twenty-year-old Lina, who was studying engineering and had her mother's precision and her grandfather's stubbornness, asked her at a family dinner six months into the practice: "Were you scared when you left the firm?"
"Terrified," Fatima said, without hesitation.
Lina looked at her. "But you did it anyway."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Fatima thought about how to answer that in a way that was honest and useful and true enough to be worth saying at a dinner table to a twenty-year-old who was watching her and drawing conclusions.
"Because the thing I was called to do was bigger than the fear I felt about doing it," she said. "And because I had come to trust, over a long time, that the God who put the calling there would not leave me alone in the middle of it."
Lina nodded slowly, with the particular attention of someone storing something away.
Fatima hoped she was. She hoped her daughter would remember, in the years ahead when the fear arrived to argue against the right things: that her mother had been terrified too. That courage had not been the absence of fear in their family. It had been the choosing to move despite it.
That was the inheritance she wanted to leave more than any professional achievement. More than any building, however beautiful, however needed.
The practice completed its first year with seven projects, twelve volunteer architects, and a waiting list that suggested the need was as large as she had always believed it to be.
She stood at the opening of the women's shelter renovation, in the finished space that had become warm and light and full of the quiet dignity that good design produces, and she thought about the partnership she had declined and the fear she had felt and the Thursday morning she had made a decision that most sensible people in her industry would have questioned.
She thought about the command: be strong and courageous.
And she thought about the promise that came with it: I will be with you wherever you go.
She had gone somewhere she had not been before. God had been there already, which she supposed was the whole point of the promise.
She was still going. Still courageous, in the specific, daily, unsensational way that courage actually looked like in a real life: one decision at a time, one open door at a time, one act of choosing the calling over the fear at a time.
A heart full of courage was not a one-time achievement.
It was a daily, faithful, quietly extraordinary practice.
She intended to keep practicing.
"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." Joshua 1:9
Comments
Post a Comment