His personal favorite thing to grab hold of is my glasses. And more recently this mama is coming closer to considering eye surgery so I don't have to wear glasses or contacts again. Whew. In all honesty, it may be a good thing that I rarely wear my glasses out in public. People might double look at the crooked four eyes walking down the grocery aisle.
Without my glasses or contacts, I'm as blind as a bat (actually that's not entirely true; it turns out that bats are actually not blind). If I try to maneuver my way around familiar places in the house, I can do a decent job. But put me on the road, at the park or the grocery store, I'd be arrested for acting drunk or some other such craziness.
Eye sight...good eye sight is so important. Without a clear picture of the world around us, we play a guessing game on what is actually taking place in our surroundings. And guessing is often wrong.
I've been reminded of the perspective we all have, the bias if you will, concerning world events and even those that hit closer to home. How we view the world around us is determined by how clearly we can see things. Our world view casts a picture of our values, our preconceptions and our priorities.
When my glasses get knocked off my face, it's an instant frustration for me. One, I worry if the glasses will break and two I feel totally incapacitated without good vision. It's as though someone was playing a cruel trick on me.
Our daughter, Adelynne recently turned four. Within her four years of life, it's amazing how much of my thinking has been tweaked or refined, now being a parent. I can't watch shows or movies where a child is being victimized. It isn't entertaining and I run far from it. My mama heart strings get tugged on all the time when I come across news stories of sweet, precious little ones without a home, without safety or basic necessities. I always put my own kids in their places. What if it happened to us? What if we were displaced?
Adelynne has kindled a love for history this past year especially. I'm totally okay with that (read: mom likes to geek out every once in a while). Recently, I handed down my three American Girl Dolls I had growing up. These are very special dolls to me. Their clothes, their accessories and books hold some of my greatest memories. They were what my parents saved up for for Christmas' and birthdays and I knew that was a sacrifice.
The original dolls were all based off historical fiction. I read their stories over and over. There were little corners in the house or my room that became my reading nooks with me and my dolls. There was nothing Pinterest worthy about those corners, but they were very memorable times. I felt transported back in time, to another world, not entirely like my own. What would it have been like to have been a pioneer?
Even recently, Addy and I got a book from the library on pioneer's on the Oregon Trail. Just reading about how much they endured through 6-8 months of traveling, most of the time walking. They lost livestock, food went bad and loved one's passed along the way. Yet, they pressed on. They carried hope in their wagons and in their hearts. Hope that the ultimate destination would be better and more profitable than what they left behind. They blazed new trails and shed many tears along the way. Camping in a trailer for a week with both kids felt many times like a chore for me. And I had creature comforts of heat, air conditioning and a refrigerator. Imagine doing that for months on end without said comforts. Traveling with all you could gather from your past life. Traveling with babies, elderly and even livestock.
Have you ever tried to explain a devastating, unjust time in history to a young child? How do you explain our country's history of slavery and other social injustices? As a parent, it's not easy. And while I do exercise caution with how much to share at this point, I don't want her to be blind to the world around her.
This world is full of much beauty and breathtaking, awe-inspiring moments. When those moments are captured, we all take a step back and admire the view as if we can't believe we get to witness and be part of something so magnificent.
But our world is also broken and the people in it are often hurting, in pain and in the lowest valley. The mountain top experiences are sometimes quickly forgotten in the midst of all of the ugliness. Another school shooting, another rape victim, another person enslaved, victimized. Low moments and seemingly no way out.
Addy has mentioned a few times a grievous line in the midst of a toddler meltdown: "It's not fair!!" This is perhaps one of my least favorite phrases and each time I hear it, I feel as though I could burst at the seams. Maybe it's because, if not used in a proper context, the words can feel utterly selfish and meaningless.
Not fair is hungry people with no food. No clean water and no safe home.
Not fair are the woman and children victimized repeatedly because some lunatic terrorist thinks it's his right.
Not fair are children given no education or no chance to enjoy their childhood and instead have to work in dangerous factories, given pennies for their labor.
Not fair are people who went to work on a normal day and ended up being victims of a shooting or a terrorist act.
There is disease. Pain. Crippling pain in our world. It often times feels overwhelming to me. And how can we not compare our lives to theirs? What if a refugee took my phone for a day and snapped selfies of a day in his life? What would he record? Would I post those things? At what point am I really any different than them? Doesn't our basic humanity hold us together, if nothing else?
I had the privilege of teaching Sunday School with our high school students recently. We unwrapped the idea of "imago dei" or being made in the image of God and how that concept alone should ripple through all we do with and in our lives.
When we allow the idea of "I'm more than..." "I'm better than..." "I'm greater than..." we are allowing a Holocaust to take place one small step at a time.
When we don't stand up against serious injustices all around us, we're treating true pain like it's some kind of cheap entertainment.
In the midst of such grief and ugliness, we can often find ourselves reaching out for answers. I am in a season of trying to be informed about social justice issues. I want to know how to Micah 6:8 this life because God "has shown us what is right and what the Lord requires of us. To do what is right, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God." I want to live into this.
Maybe it means supporting more fair-trade entrepreneurs, where workers are given just payment for their work and in fair working conditions.
Perhaps we buy soap for Christmas gifts, made by refugee's in Syria, trying to get back on their feet and break a vicious cycle.
Or maybe it's in how we spend our time and what we put our efforts toward.
Maybe we selfie capture more than ourselves with weird snap chat filters and less time playing Pokemon Go and spend more time talking with people and being super intentional about how we spend our time with them.
If knowledge is truly power, let's begin by turning what we know into change one small step at a time. Let's be prepared to have our vision adjusted and our perspective altered, if need be. Lets try to spend less time debating if we should interact and welcome and just do it.
Here are some great places to get started in being informed:
- http://www.preemptivelove.org/
- http://www.doortograce.org/
- http://www.thearchibaldproject.com/
- https://www.ijm.org/
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