Our Immaturity is Showing

In light of recent events that are perpetuating division, I am pondering some questions:

• Why are my friends who identify as pro-life saying it’s OK to degrade and dehumanize people who do not share the same values they do?
• Why are my friends who say they are advocates for diversity, equity, and inclusion othering people and using divisive and hurtful language in their conversations?
• Why are people up in arms about a prominent white man being shot but going about their day like normal when black and brown boys are murdered?

It has me wondering: What do we hold sacred?

Is it our beliefs and labels that give us a sense of power and control when it should be the sacredness of every human life?

The way we are moving through these most recent crises show our immaturity, our lack of wisdom, and our desperate need to remember the truth.

This is an incredible opportunity for each of us to lay down our weapons (literal and proverbial), stop pointing fingers, calm our hearts, minds, and bodies, and expand our ability as leaders.

Will you have the courage to do it? Maybe, but how?

We have to start by calming our hearts, minds, and bodies. Get off social media if that has you ramped up. Reconnect with what brings you into a bigger and longer perspective. This is not the first or the last time we will be in turmoil as a country.

We have been through tougher times than these but we have lost our ability to deal with adversity in a healthy way. We have to relearn how to bring ourselves back to a state of groundedness and centeredness.

We cannot afford to have leaders reacting to the world while they are dysregulated. This is immature and dangerous.

Look in the mirror – are you one of them? How often are you reacting to a post, comment, conversation, or circumstance in a negative way? Me too. We all have work to do. Take a breath, take a break. Get out in nature, go for a walk, journal. Whatever it takes to help you discharge the emotions and energy and come back to a feeling of centeredness.

THIS IS A HUGE CHALLENGE in our world of busyness and distraction. We have to make sacrifices to find our peace. I hope you will choose to do the hard work to find your way back to a regulated, thoughtful, open, compassionate place. This is wisdom work, and we need you.

Once we are more regulated, then we have the opportunity to evaluate what is happening from a space beyond emotion, stress, fear, and frustration.

I believe we really need to challenge our core beliefs, our foundation, with some difficult questions like:

• What do I believe about myself? About others? About the world?
• What is most important?
• What is sacred?
• What am I afraid of?
• Do I have the ability to hold a different perspective?
• Am I willing to try to understand and eventually love others even if they are different?

Here is what I have come to KNOW. Not just believe…this is the TRUTH:

We are all victims and perpetrators. We are all human. We were made to love and be loved. ALL OF US.

The labels and finger pointing are an indicator of our immaturity and our lack of wisdom.

Yes, harm has been done. Yes, it needs to be rectified. But not in a way that results in revenge, but in a way that results in restoration. A way that brings us back together, not separates us further.

God calls us beyond that…to hold complexity of the world we are living in. To remember our divinity. To move beyond fear and division and remember that we are all human, we are one. The perpetrators and the victims. It’s almost incomprehensible…like God is.

When we can hold all of it, then we know we are closer to being able to find a real, sustainable, long-term solution. Then we have the capacity to consider the real question my good and wise friend posed recently: How do we get through this together?

This is the “narrow way” that Jesus calls us to and tells us most will never choose.

It starts with our own story. I continue to sit with all the ways that I am a perpetrator in my everyday life. All the ways that I have sinned. I sit with those realities in the presence of God until He reveals the truth of his grace, love, and mercy to me and I am able to move beyond fear, guilt and shame, and feel compassion for myself.

In that space I find my own humanity again. It is only then that I am able to find forgiveness for my perpetrators and the moments I have been victimized, and I am able to truly see them as human again. One with me, as God created us to be.

It’s an incomprehensible experience until you have it, and it’s something I have to come back to and surrender to daily. I believe this is the work God is calling those who have courage to do in this moment.

As Father Richard Rohr reminds us, there will always be order then disorder then reorder.

I want my reorder to look like love, grace, mercy, compassion, connection, and unity instead of hate, fear, confusion, disconnection, and separation. I have a responsibility to contribute in a way that could bring about this new reality. Each of us do.

Which reorder will you choose? How will you contribute to a new way forward with your thoughts, words and actions?