"The call to courage begins with vulnerability."
— Tom Strong
There are rooms where men walk in carrying everything — the weight of what they've done, what they've failed to do, what they're afraid others might find out. They sit down, cross their arms, and wait to see if this is safe. Most of the time, they leave the same way they came. Armor on. Nothing given. Nothing received.
Then there are the rare mornings — the ones you don't plan for — when someone speaks and something breaks open. Not the person. The silence. And suddenly the room shifts, and every man in it leans in just a little closer, because what was just said is what none of them had the nerve to say first.
That is what happened the Friday morning Tom Strong walked in and set his military dress uniform jacket on the table.
Not to impress. To tell the truth.
— ✦ —
A Chest Full of Stories
Tom is a retired Army chaplain. A man who has worn the uniform of the Special Operations community, earned the Combat Action Badge, served in submarine units — a Navy badge on an Army uniform, as he noted with a quiet grin. He spent years in combat zones. He has sat with the dying. He has helped carry the bags of men he knew.
But what Tom brought that morning was not his record of valor. He brought a story about a 250-foot tower and a torn calf muscle and a limp he hid from the men who were paid to watch for it.
He was forty-five years old when his unit sent him to the Army's Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia — three weeks of learning to jump out of planes. He was the second oldest among 432 students. And from the moment he arrived, the message was clear: chaplains fail. Don't be another one.
"Hey Chappy," the black-cap instructors announced in front of everyone, "are you going to fail out like most of your fellow chaplains?"
Tom let the words land. He didn't argue. He suited up.
One of the culminating exercises was the 250-foot tower — a massive steel structure with four arms extending outward, each rigged to raise a jumper strapped to a parachute and then release them, letting them drift to the plowed earth below. It had been broken for three months. Tom was told he would go first, as a kind of good-luck offering.
"The last guy we tested on this," the instructor announced to the assembled students, "blew into the frame, got caught, and fell."
Four hundred and thirty-two people watched the old chaplain step up.
He floated down soft as a leaf.
The first jump of the final week was different.
It was a long day. The kind where exhaustion lives in your joints. And somewhere in it, Tom felt it — a tearing, deep in his right calf. He looked down. He could see blood pooling beneath the skin. The muscle had torn, forty to fifty percent of it gone. Four more jumps remained before he could earn his wings.
That night, limping back to the barracks, Tom sat with something harder than physical pain. He sat with the weight of what it would mean to quit. The commanders who had believed in him. The Army funds spent. The four hundred students watching. The instructors already waiting for the chaplain to confirm what they expected.
"Lord," he said, "what do I do?"
And a verse came.
"Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand."
— Isaiah 41:10
The next morning, formation assembled before dawn. Every student ran a mile in boots and uniform to the gear-up site. It was how the black-cap instructors screened for injuries — watching for any soldier whose gait gave them away. Tom knew this. Tom had one good leg.
So he limped on the good one.
He exaggerated the limp on his healthy left leg so that his stride evened out, and he ran through the screen, four more mornings in a row, four more jumps, blood still moving beneath his skin, Isaiah 41:10 still moving through his mind.
He earned his wings. The oldest man left standing.
— ✦ —
Two Sides of the Same Coin
Tom had been reading Brené Brown's Daring Greatly when something cracked open in his thinking. Brown told the story of a soldier who had received a medal for valor on the battlefield — and she connected that courage not to strength, but to vulnerability.
"As soon as I read that," Tom told the room, "I thought — I have a chest full of moments where I was vulnerable. I just never thought about it that way."
That reframe is the whole ballgame.
For most men, vulnerability and courage exist on a spectrum. The more courage you develop, the less vulnerable you become. Weakness on one end. Strength on the other. That is what we were taught. That is the whole architecture of the Western hero — the lone gunslinger who needs no one, who shows nothing, who bleeds in private if he bleeds at all.
But Tom was standing in front of a roomful of men saying: it's not a spectrum. It's a coin.
Flip it over. On one side — courage. On the other — vulnerability. They are not opposites. They are the same thing, seen from different angles.
"Vulnerability is really related to courage, but for many of us, we've never thought of it as a courageous act to be vulnerable." — Tom Strong
One of the men in the room, a pastor, pushed back gently — or rather, pushed deeper. He talked about the men's groups he'd led over the years, and how every group goes through the same pattern. Surface talk. Safe answers. A long stretch of nothing real. And then someone breaks the seal.
"Somebody leads out with vulnerability," he said, "and all of a sudden you're like — oh, I feel that too. It normalizes it. It makes it possible." He paused. "I think there's a great power in being vulnerable as a leader. It begets vulnerability. It calls it out."
He told the story about the door. The time he got into a fight with his wife and she left for the airport, and he, in a moment of rage, kicked the bathroom door so hard it punched a hole in it. He spent the weekend sanding and spackling. When she came back, she told him to figure it out.
Months later, he stood in front of his congregation and preached on anger. He brought the door.
"I was terrified," he said. "I thought — this is my last Sunday. Everyone's going to leave. Here's this pastor who should be witnessing to people on airplanes, and he's kicking holes in doors."
But thirty years later, more men from that congregation have told him that sermon changed their lives than anything else he ever preached. Man after man pulling him aside: "I punched a wall. I thought I was a monster. I came to church every week ashamed. And then you said that, and I thought — there's a way out."
Not the pastor's polish. The pastor's hole in the door.
— ✦ —
What Keeps Us from the Coin
One of the men in the circle — someone who works with men in recovery — named what sits between us and vulnerability with unusual precision. He said he's watched men circle community, truth, and authenticity their whole lives. They want all three. But every time they get close, three things push them back.
Fear. Trust. Image.
"Vulnerability is putting yourself out there regardless of how the people around you are going to receive it — and overcoming the fear, the trust, and the image that insecurity may be covering up." — A man in the room
Fear of rejection. Fear that what you reveal will be used against you. Fear that the thing you confess will become the thing you're known for.
Trust that doesn't yet exist, or that has been broken before. The scar tissue from the last time you opened up and someone walked.
And image — the hardest one. The face you've built. The reputation that took years. The version of you that works, that leads, that provides, that handles things. The one you're not sure survives contact with the truth.
Tom had named this too, standing in front of 432 students with instructors waiting for him to fail. He recognized the gravitational pull of it — the way men seek to validate their worth from the outside in.
"And yet," he said quietly, "what God says about us — what the gospel is all about — is that we validate our worth from the inside out."
That sentence landed.
Because that is the whole argument, isn't it. As long as your worth lives outside you — in the title, the performance, the perception of others — vulnerability is an existential threat. You cannot afford to be seen as weak, because weak is all you are without the external scaffolding.
But when your worth is grounded in something that cannot be taken by circumstance or failure or an instructor's contempt — when you are held by a righteous right hand that you did not earn — then vulnerability becomes something else entirely. It becomes the doorway through which real life enters.
— ✦ —
Flourishing Requires Both
Jeff shared his insights Andy Crouch's book Strong and Weak, and he brought it into the conversation at exactly the right moment. Crouch constructs a two-by-two quadrant: authority on one axis, vulnerability on the other. The four quadrants he names are flourishing, suffering, withdrawal, and exploitation.
High authority, high vulnerability: flourishing.
High authority, low vulnerability: exploitation.
Low authority, high vulnerability: suffering.
Low authority, low vulnerability: withdrawal.
The insight that stopped the room: the goal is not to have the most authority or the least vulnerability. The goal is to have both. Fully. At the same time. And the failure mode for men in leadership — especially strong men, gifted men, men with genuine authority — is not that they lack capability. It's that they protect themselves from vulnerability so thoroughly that they tip into exploitation. Power without exposure. Strength without tenderness.
"The way to be the most flourishing father is to be a father who understands what his authority and responsibility are within the position — but who also has high vulnerability." —
Jeff told the story of his first days leading a large international team — walking into a role he wasn't sure he was qualified for, in a cultural context he didn't fully understand. He started being radically transparent about his limitations. "I don't know anything about that. You're the expert. I trust you."
And it almost worked against him.
One of his team members, through the grapevine, finally sent word: "It would be nice to know that we have a leader who is confident in his position."
He sat with that. Not to harden back up, but to ask the harder question Crouch's framework raises: What does it look like to lead from a place that is simultaneously strong and exposed? To carry the weight of the position without hiding behind it, and to admit limitation without abandoning the people who need you to lead?
"I wanted my team to flourish," he said. "Even when I was suffering in the role, how do I get above that line — how do I still get my team to grow?"
The answer, the room decided together, is not a formula. It is a posture. And that posture is love.
"We're not courageous for courage's sake. We're not vulnerable for the sake of vulnerability. Why would I do that? It's risky. The reason we do it — the only reason that sustains it — is love for whoever has been entrusted to us." — Sheldon
— ✦ —
The Strange Arithmetic of Suffering
Someone said something in the middle of all of this that no one had quite planned to say, and it settled over the room like a second presence:
"Your authority is one hundred percent related to your suffering. Through that suffering, there's something that emboldens you. Your personal influence and personal authority is one hundred percent linked to your ability to suffer."
It sounds counterintuitive until you sit in it a moment. We do not follow people because they have never been broken. We follow people who have been broken and found a way forward — or are still, humbly, finding it.
David is the model Tom's tradition keeps returning to. The man anointed to be king who ends up in a cave, surrounded by the desperate and the dejected. The disgraced. The indebted. The discontented. And out of that — out of his own suffering — he becomes their captain.
Not despite the cave. Because of it.
"David could have said — I've got enough of my own problems right now," one man observed. "I don't have capacity. I can't lead you in your struggles. But he didn't. He went: okay. I've been called. I'm suffering. These people have a need. This is where God has me."
There is a difference, though, between leading out of suffering and wallowing in it publicly. One man drew it clearly: the leader who stands up and says "I'm really struggling this week, pray for me" every week eventually has no one left to lead. That is not vulnerability — that is the absence of direction.
The movement that matters, the one that produces actual authority and connection, is from "I have suffered" to "and here is what I learned" — or even the more honest version: "and here is how I am, slowly, with God's help, working through it."
That is the sermon on anger. That is the limp disguised as a normal stride. That is the forty-five-year-old chaplain finishing the jump school because Isaiah 41 said he would be upheld.
Not victory. Faithfulness.
— ✦ —
We Were Never Meant to Go It Alone
Tom came back, at the end, to where he always comes back: battle buddies.
On the battlefield, he said, if you ask any war fighter — male or female — "Were you ever vulnerable?" — they will say yes. Every single time. One hundred percent. Because the battlefield strips the performance away. Nobody gets to be invincible when the ground is shaking.
And yet we walk around in our civilian lives pretending the ground isn't shaking.
"Life is an adventure," Tom said. "And it's a battlefield. And it's hard. We've all seen that in each other, and we've experienced it ourselves. And so we need each other."
One of the men told a quiet story about his divorce. A Saturday morning, alone in the house. He couldn't stop crying. The weight of failure and brokenness sitting on his chest. And he picked up his phone and thought about calling a friend — a friend whose wife happened to be on his team at work. Which meant that if he called, she would know. And that meant the leader he worked so hard to appear to be would be exposed as the suffering man he actually was.
He called anyway.
His friend texted back: "We're going hiking. Meet us here."
"I spent the rest of the day with them," he said. "It pulled me out of that pit. But it was vulnerable. I was struggling with whether it was even courageous — or was it just foolish?"
That's the honest question. And the men in the room sat with it together.
Is vulnerability risky? Yes. Is it guaranteed to work out? No. Can you get hurt? Absolutely. Can you be rejected? Of course.
Someone offered a picture: a dog rolling over. Exposing its stomach — the softest, most undefended part of its body. The risk of being hurt. And the possibility of being known.
"Life isn't about being safe," he said. "It's about managing risk. And that's really what parenting is. That's what friendship is. That's what any real relationship is."
Another man added, almost under his breath: "And even to yourself, coming down to a point where you love yourself enough."
That is it, isn't it. The courage to be vulnerable is finally, at its root, an act of love. Love for the people around you. Love received from God. And enough love for yourself to believe that the truth of who you are — the whole of it, the medals and the limp and the hole in the door — is worth bringing into the room.
— ✦ —
Questions Worth Carrying
Tom left the room with a few questions. Not the kind you answer quickly. The kind you carry around for a while and let work on you.
1. How would life be different — from this point forward — if you held the coin of vulnerability and courage together, understanding them not as opposites but as two sides of the same thing?
2. How does this show up in the different areas of your life — your marriage, your parenting, your work, your friendship, your relationship with God?
3. Personal development has been called "loving yourself." We are told to love God, love others, and love ourselves. Where does vulnerability fit into that third category — loving yourself honestly enough to be known?
4. How do we lead by example rather than by performance? What does it look like when vulnerability becomes the thing people are actually following?
5. Where is vulnerability a liability? Not every room is safe. Not every moment calls for full exposure. What is the discernment required — what one man in the room called "appropriate vulnerability"?
That last question matters. Vulnerability is not a program. It is not a technique. It is not a box to check. The man who tells everyone everything all the time is not being vulnerable — he is being indiscriminate. There are rooms that are not yet safe. There are relationships that have not yet built the trust. There are positions of authority in which certain burdens are yours to carry alone.
Appropriate vulnerability, as one of the men put it, is discernment. It's the opening story that lets a guard down without betraying a confidence. It's the admission that you don't have all the answers without abandoning the people who need you to lead. It's the limp on the good leg — not because you're hiding forever, but because this isn't the moment, and you know the difference.
— ✦ —
The Call to Courage
There is a passage in 2 Corinthians that one of the men read aloud that morning, and it has the weight of lived experience behind it:
"Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day."
— 2 Corinthians 4:16
Wasting away and being renewed. At the same time. Not one after the other. Simultaneously. That is the strange, holy arithmetic of a life lived in honest dependence — on God, on others, on the truth of who you are and what you need.
Tom stood at the end and said it plainly:
"The call to courage begins with vulnerability."
Not after vulnerability. Not despite it. Begins with it.
The men in that room carry a lot. One is watching a job evaporate. Another is in the long aftermath of a marriage that didn't survive. Several carry the faces of people they have lost — in combat zones, in hospital rooms, in their own families. All of them are wasting away in some measure and being renewed in another. All of them showed up that Friday morning to a room where they are allowed, finally, to say so.
That is not weakness. That is the bravest thing most men ever do.
Tom is moving on — a new season, a new city, the men in Tulsa who don't yet know what's coming. He will walk into new rooms and eventually set something on the table that tells the truth. He will offer the limp behind the stride, the blood beneath the skin, the verse that got him through. And because he does, other men will find permission to do the same.
That is how courage spreads.
Not from the man who claims he was never afraid. From the man who was afraid, and went anyway, and can tell you what held him up.
— ✦ —
Reflections
As the morning ended, one of the men put words to what the room had been circling for an hour. He talked about his father, who could not ride in the backseat because he had driven trucks for decades and could not relinquish the wheel. He tied it to the spiritual life, to all the ways we insist on driving — on having the answers, on managing the outcome, on keeping the appearance of control.
"Vulnerability in that context," he said, "is not having control. It's a trust issue. Do you trust who has the wheel?"
We trust God with our eternity. But we white-knuckle the steering wheel of our daily lives — our reputations, our failures, our fears, our marriages, our finances, our bodies as they age — as if the surrender that saved us was a one-time transaction and not a daily practice.
The men on that Friday morning were practicing it. In the imperfect, ordinary way that men practice things. Telling true stories. Asking hard questions. Sitting in discomfort long enough for something real to surface.
Not performing courage. Being it.
One man offered the image of the deaf interpreter trying to translate the word "vulnerability" and not finding it, finally just laying a hand over his heart and opening his chest. Tom smiled at that and said nothing, because there was nothing to add.
That's the whole sermon, right there.
Hand over the heart. Chest open.
Not knowing if it will be received. Going first anyway.
— ✦ —
A Prayer to Close
Jesus — We thank you for the model you gave us. You left the safety of everything and walked among us. You were God and you became vulnerable — exhausted, grieving, betrayed, misunderstood, afraid in a garden. Not performing vulnerability. Choosing it. For us. Help us become men who hold the coin. Men who understand that the courage you call us to and the vulnerability you invite us into are not enemies, but companions. Two sides of the same act of trust.
Where we are wasting away — in our bodies, our relationships, our finances, our sense of self — renew us inwardly, day by day. When the ground shakes, let us not reach for the performance. Let us reach for you, and for each other.
Teach us appropriate vulnerability — the discernment to know what room we're in, what moment it is, what is ours to carry and what is ours to offer. And give us the courage to be the one who goes first. The one who breaks the seal. The one who tells the truth so that the man next to us doesn't have to carry his in silence anymore.
We pray for every man reading this who is running on a broken leg. Who is limping on the good side so no one pulls him out. You see the blood beneath the skin. You know the verse he needs. Meet him there. Hold him. Strengthen him. Uphold him with your righteous right hand.
And may we never forget: the call to courage begins with vulnerability.
In Christ's name, who was strong and weak, courageous and broken, authority and sacrifice —
Amen.
— ✦ —