My Father was a good cricketer in his day.  Every weekend, I’d go and watch him play for our local club, hoping I’d be good enough to join him one day.  Sadly, my brother got the sports genes.

The very first time my Mother saw him in action, before they were married, Dad took a ball to the face and lost his front teeth.  It wasn’t exactly an auspicious moment in their courtship.  One of the things I knew, secretly, when I watched him years later was that I didn’t just lack talent – I wasn’t really brave enough to get in the way of a cricket ball travelling at speed.

We live at a time when we are constantly reminded of more serious kinds of courage; the courage of members of the armed forces, or of aid workers in both natural and man-made disasters.

The Bible tells us dramatic stories of courage too: of David fighting Goliath, for example, or Moses standing up to the mighty Pharoah.  But it also teaches that courage isn’t always a dramatic thing – it is in the quiet faith and determination of Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, or of Jacob, working fourteen years to earn the love of his wife Rachel. This is the courage I most admire, the daily courage that doesn’t moan and doesn’t draw attention to itself but simply gets on – and, amazingly, is all around us.

I see it in my friend Sally, who has Parkinsons Disease, but spends her time thinking of imaginative ways to promote new medical research, raising awareness and money in equal measure.  I see it in my Dad, too – and not just on the cricket pitch: he was much braver when he had to get up and find a new job after being made redundant in his early fifties.  I may have missed out on the sports genes, but I hope I inherit some of the rest.