What Does It Cost to Do the Right Thing

Knowing the right thing is rarely the hard part. Most of us can name at least one situation where we are fairly sure what we should do and have not done it, because we can also name what it would cost. Courage grows the way strength does: through small, deliberate repetitions taken before the heavy moment arrives. The practice below gives you a week of those repetitions. It is anchored in the story of Rev. Clay Evans, a Chicago pastor whose new sanctuary stood unfinished for seven years after he opened his church to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

You can work through it alone in one sitting and then live the practice for seven days. A group can cover the reading and discussion in one meeting, run the practice during the week, and meet again to compare notes. Nothing here requires you to share anything personal. Where a prompt asks you to name something, writing it privately counts.

Start with the thing you already know

Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left, write one situation where you are fairly sure what the right thing is and you have not done it. It might be a conversation you keep postponing, an injustice at work you keep stepping around, or a stand you have only taken in private.

On the right side, write down everything you have said about that situation: to friends, online, in your own head. Be honest about how articulate you have been.

If the right side is long and the left side has not moved, you are in good company. That gap is the subject of this guide. Keep the paper. You will come back to it at the end.

Read the builder Jesus describes

Read Luke 14:25-33 aloud, slowly. Jesus is speaking to large crowds following him, and he is talking about what it means to be his disciple. In the middle of it he says, “For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish” (Luke 14:28-30).

Make a few observations with a pencil before you interpret anything:

• Underline what the builder does first. Jesus assumes counting comes before building.
• Circle who shows up when the building stalls. The cost in this parable includes onlookers and their mockery, not just money.
• Read verse 33 and notice how Jesus applies the image. The parable is about the price of following him, not about construction projects.

Now set Clay Evans beside the parable. Dr. Zach Mills, a communication scholar and preacher who wrote Evans’s biography, recounts that city leaders warned Evans to stay away from King. Evans kept hosting the movement’s weekly meetings, and the city shut down his building project. Looking back, Mills said that “for seven years, it just stood as this monument of what his courage cost him.” Mills adds that other pastors would stand outside and laugh at him.

Here is the interpretive work. The builder in Jesus’s story is mocked because he never counted. Evans was mocked even though he had counted, because the warning told him the price in advance. Ask yourself which is closer to how you have been using the idea of counting the cost. For many of us, counting has become the reason we never start. Jesus describes counting as preparation for a commitment, and verse 33 makes clear the commitment is total.

Read the believers who stayed quiet

Turn to John 12:42-43: “Nevertheless among the chief rulers also many believed on him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue: For they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.”

Mark three things in the passage:

• Box the word that tells you what these rulers already had. John says they believed. Their problem was not information.
• Underline the specific loss they feared: being put out of the synagogue. It has a name and a shape.
• Circle the motive John names underneath the fear in verse 43.

John is narrating what happened, not issuing a command, but his narration is a diagnosis. Now write the same three things for your own left-column situation: what you already believe, the specific loss you fear, and whose approval sits underneath it. Use a real name or room, not a general category.

Pair it with Proverbs 29:25: “The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe.” Proverbs speaks in wise principles, not guarantees. Evans trusted God and still lost seven years of his building, along with his standing among colleagues. The snare the proverb describes is what fear does to the person who obeys it: they end up trapped by the very approval they were protecting.

What Mills noticed about fear

The most useful thing Mills offers for this practice is a diagnosis he applies to himself first. He said, “we progressive Christian leaders have mastered the rhetoric of social justice. Many of them are still struggling with fear of what living that rhetoric out will actually cost.” He is trained in communication and admits he knows how to move a congregation with those words. He wonders whether some problems in our communities stay unfixed because leaders “are not quite willing to cross that line to open themselves up, to be vulnerable, fully vulnerable to the consequences of what it will actually mean, what it will actually cost.”

Notice what that does to your two columns. Mills is suggesting that fluency can become a substitute for courage. The more skillfully we talk about a thing, the more we can feel we have done it. That is why this guide does not ask you to learn more. It asks you to move the left column.

Two more details matter for training. Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, responded by admitting that she herself sometimes struggles with courage, knowing what a particular stance or simply building bridges will cost. And Mills found that Evans was not born bold. He describes a sickly child who did not speak until he was almost three, who was bullied in school and had low self-esteem. Whatever nerve Evans had in 1966 was built, not issued at birth.

Mills also says Evans taught him to take calculated risks, made after prayer, thought, conversation and collaboration. Courage, in this account, is deliberate, and it is rarely solitary. Mills described his own daily question this way: “how do I think about taking risks and being courageous, even when I’m unsure of what’s ahead of this next step?” Evans did not know the building would eventually be finished. He acted without the ending.

Test it: brave, or just loud?

There is a counterfeit that can hijack this exercise. Mills observes, “There’s this obsession with blowing bridges up and the spectacle of it.” That kind of boldness often costs nothing and pays in attention. Evans went the other way. Mills says Evans built bridges with people others would have called his enemies: “He would come to the table and reason with them and try to build bridges.” In the 1980s, Mills says, Evans helped bring together long-divided South Side and West Side Black pastors to work through the city’s issues together.

Run your left-column situation through three tests:

1. Who pays? If you would gain applause and lose nothing, it may be spectacle. If you would lose standing, comfort or an advantage, you are probably looking at the real thing.
2. Does it require listening? Bridge-building courage usually includes sitting at a table with someone you disagree with. Spectacle avoids the table.
3. Have you prayed, thought and talked it over with someone wise? If not, the step this week may be that conversation rather than the stand itself.

Courage also does not mean walking alone into danger. If the right thing you are weighing involves someone who has harmed you or threatens your safety, the courageous step is to get support first, not to confront that person by yourself. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233.

The seven-day workout

One honest caveat before you start. A week of small repetitions does not guarantee you will hold firm when the bill is large, and prudence can look like cowardice from the outside, just as stubbornness can look like courage. What practice can do is make the first step familiar, so the heavy moment is not also the first time you have acted against fear. It trains readiness. It does not promise it.

Choose one situation from your left column. Only one. Then run this for a week.

1. Morning: name the price in one sentence. Write or say, Doing this could cost me ______. Fill the blank with something concrete: a friendship, a promotion, a reputation, a group chat’s approval. A named price is something you can decide about. Unnamed dread decides for you.
2. Morning: pray Daniel 3:17-18 in your own words. Three men tell the king their God is able to deliver them, and then add, “But if not,” they still will not bow (Daniel 3:18). Ask God for the nerve to act without knowing the outcome. The passage itself refuses to make rescue the condition.
3. Once this week: the counsel rep. Tell one trusted person what you are weighing and what it might cost. This is the conversation and collaboration Mills names. It also makes it harder to quietly let the matter drop.
4. Daily: one unfiltered rep. Mills wonders whether social media, which he calls “a very convenient way to curate a very safe image,” trains us to avoid being seen. Each day, do one small thing without managing how it looks. Disagree respectfully in a meeting. Admit you were wrong. Ask the question everyone is avoiding. Do not post about it.
5. By day seven: one real step. The conversation, the email, the stand, or the table you have been avoiding. A small step you actually take trains more than a large one you only imagine.
6. Night: one line. What did I risk today, and what did it actually cost? Some nights the answer will be that you risked nothing. Write that down too. The record will show you whether the price you feared matched the price you paid.

Questions for a group, or for yourself

If you lead a group, pick three or four questions ahead of time and make clear that anyone can pass. If the room goes quiet, wait; people are often deciding whether to say something real. If the conversation drifts into a debate about politics or about who was right in 1966, bring it back to what conviction costs today.

• Jesus’s builder is mocked for not counting. Evans was mocked after counting. Which mockery do you fear more, and why?
• The rulers in John 12 believed and stayed silent. What makes silence feel like a reasonable choice to a person who believes?
• Mills suggests that skill in talking about justice can stand in for living it. Where might that be true in your church, your campus or your own habits?
• Evans was a bullied, sickly child before he was a courageous pastor. Does that change what you think courage is? What would change your mind?
• How would you tell the difference, in the moment, between a stand that costs something and a performance that earns something?
• Mills says Evans’s risks came after prayer, thought, conversation and collaboration. Which of those four do you tend to skip?

For the second meeting, ask only one thing: what happened when you named the price each morning? Let people report what changed and what did not, without turning anyone’s week into a verdict on their faithfulness.

Back to your two columns

At the end of the week, take out the paper from the first exercise. Under both columns, write one new line: the price you named on day one, and the price you actually paid. Evans paid with seven years of an unfinished building and the laughter of colleagues, and he did not know how it would end. Your bill is probably smaller and just as specific. Notice which of the two numbers on that line has been making your decisions.