Dare to Care

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by all the craziness that is going on in our world?

I feel like the answer to that question is a given.

Who hasn’t these days?

All the confusion, the chaos, the hurt…and most days I feel like I can’t tell which way is up. I am stuck in the undertow of the deep dark ocean and I don’t know which way to swim to reach the light. The place where I can safely breathe again. Everything seems to be passing by so quickly… its in one ear and out the other. It’s here one day and gone the next.

I will be very vulnerable with you. Most days I don’t want to recognize or even face what’s going on- the politics, the injustice, the different obscure versions of everyone’s truths, the headlines, the death, the sickness, the fear. It is just so much easier to ignore it or put it in a box and bury it deep down where my awareness just barely reaches it day to day. Truthfully, I don’t know if I can be faced with it, because what if it breaks me? What if it’s just too much to handle? What if my hands just aren’t big or strong enough to hold that along with everything else I have going on?

During my fellowship last year, I was surrounded by women who work with the most vulnerable populations. They work with hurting people who are carrying severe trauma. How can you hear these horrific stories and not break down?

It really made me reflect on who I am and what my tendencies are. One of my deepest struggles is willingly walking into uncomfortable situations. Whether that is walking into a really tough workout that I am terrified of or walking into a really challenging and maybe even confrontational conversation. Either way, I don’t like to be uncomfortable.

One of the ways I am challenged is taking time to let myself feel someone else’s pain or recognize the severity of a situation. In my world, I would much rather ignore it and keep moving onto happier thoughts. However, this way of living is actually a willful ignorance of the darkness in the world. Choosing to ignore it or choosing to bury it is the selfish thing to do.

But I am scared of wrestling with the hard things!

What if it makes me feel a conviction or makes me feel hopeless? What if I lose my sense of truth? What if I am wrong about this? What if I was living the wrong way this entire time?

I don’t know if you have ever had these questions roll around in your head before, but they are often taking up space in mine. Taking the time to care about something that might really tug on your heart strings or may create a deep anger with the cruelty of the world…will change you. It will alter your worldview. Maybe that is why we avoid it sometimes. Maybe that is why we like our worldview the way it is now and change seems frightening and uncertain.

I get it.

Have you ever needed to ask a question, but you were so terrified to know the answer. That is how I feel about a lot of the difficult social dilemmas in our present day. It just seems easier to not ask the question… because if I ask the question, then I have to hear the answer… and if I hear the answer I might have to change something about myself/ the way I live/ what I believe, etc.

So it is easier to just NOT.

But this is why we are in the dark days we are in… because no one wants to change their perspective. No one wants to listen. No one wants to alter the way they live. So we rip away our emotional connection to these issues and become careless.

But this benefits no one. This is not how we grow together. Every perspective you have - is because you listened to someone… whether it was your parents, friends, pastor, mentor, teacher, etc. Every mission you believe in is because somewhere along the way you believed it mattered and therefore you cared.

What if we faced our fears of the complexity of these big world issues and did our best to confront them, understand them, and maybe even alter them? What if we didn’t run away when something felt messy and sensitive? What if we stopped letting our insecurities run over our willingness to learn and grow? What would happen in our world if we were more daring and caring?

So today, I challenge us…

Dare to care.