Tender Tuesday: Encouragement for the Spiritual Warrior 1.0

by Jessica Girija Jewell

Tuesday has a Martian quality — sharp, fiery, purifying. This is a new weekly offering to encourage the spiritual warrior in you.

"Steadfastness is a lovely, old-fashioned word that we don't hear much about these days. It describes how warriors stand their ground, how they find their position and stay there, unshaken and immoveable. Steadfast people are firm in their resolve; they are not shaken by events or circumstances. They stand clear in their beliefs, grounded in their cause, faithful to the end.

Steadfast people seem very rare these days, a distinct minority in the flood of opportunistic, self-serving, priority-switching, disloyal people we encounter daily. And we may question our own steadfastness. But there are enough of us out there, people who place a value on steadfastness and want to learn how to develop it.

It's fine for steadfast people to be the minority. The world always and only changes from the actions and commitment of "a small group of dedicated people" as sociologist Margaret Mead stated so clearly years ago. Instead of being distracted by all the unsteadfast ones, we need to actively search for each other and expect we'll find us.

Yet we will have to look in new places — among those we've discounted and misjudged, those who disappeared from our awareness months or years ago. We have to look again, and be willing to be surprised by who we see.

And once we find each other, we need to support and encourage our steadfast behaviors — the times when any one of us speaks up, stands our ground, sees clearly, refuses to yield, doesn't give up.

Steadfastness is a capacity that gets easier as we're together. The ground we stand on gets more firm and offers more support. It expands to uphold a surprising number of spiritual warriors." -- from Margaret Wheatley's Perseverance