Today I simply want to share something brief that I heard on a podcast a couple of days ago. Many of us–most, perhaps–are stressed about the upcoming election. In my case, at least, there are byproducts of this stress that don’t “seem like me.” I find myself, for instance, feeling very judgmental toward the millions of people who are just as entrenched in their belief about who must be the next president–but they disagree with me about who that person is. How can any adult human being with functioning neurons disagree with me on this? How has this country come to has millions of idiots?
On Kate Bowler’s “Everything Happens” podcast, she ends each interview with a blessing. This week’s blessing hit me in ways that I didn’t want to be hit, but definitely need to consider. Maybe it will do the same for you. Have a great long weekend.
God, this is a hard one. How do I begin to love or even connect with someone so different from me? How do I bridge this gap? It feels just as wrong as the beliefs I abhor.
Blessed are we who want to be a part of the wild and beautiful experiment to find common humanity, who desire to come willingly into the gap that separates human from human. To love the stranger, especially the one you really don’t understand and secretly want to set straight.
Blessed are we willing to stay in the gap, in the contradictions of what we can’t understand, to actively work on disproving our own intuitions about another. In order to begin to see what they see.
Blessed are we swimming upstream against the current of our own human frailty, our fears and emotions, and willing to be wrong for a second, to reconsider and to hold to our integrity with kindness. Desiring to see the lay of the land and play the course instead of the one we wished it could be. And to discover that humility is what makes change possible.
Grace is never neutral. It works backwards and forwards in time. Conspiring to make wrong right.
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