​It’s like all the clocks are melting, isn’t it? Blatant acts of war all over the world make it feel that way, but what might trouble me more is our warring with each other over all of it. We seem driven by fear so pervasive that we can’t tell who is the enemy, so everyone is. I see good people searching the Bible and their souls for how to treat those on the fringes and coming up with answers driven by fear, not love. We clutch what we’ve got and round our shoulders to protect ourselves from unknown evil around us. We’ve made a habit of taking sides and drawing lines and reducing those on the other side as other, suspect, less than.

And meanwhile life goes on, because that’s what it does, if you’re lucky. So we carry on living with these lines everywhere, our hearts hardened to people who are, actually, probably just like us. And it scares me more than terrorist attacks, more than suicide bombers, and here is why: something made those people turn. Something made them think their way was so much higher, better. They turned on the people around them. And I think anything can feel normal, after a while.

I don’t want division and hate, anxiety and fear to feel so normal that we pass it on to our kids without even realizing it. I want to live like children of the light. But sometimes the darkness pervades and the light feels powerless to even illuminate the step in front of me. It feels that way now.

Still, I shine my weak light where I can. That means helping those we know in ways that we can. And for the last ten years, for us, Thanksgiving and Christmas have been times to help strangers. It started with a free turkey I didn’t need, and the response overwhelmed me.  So most years since, I have posted on or searched Craigslist, looking for families to help. I know there are plenty of good organizations that help others in similar ways, and we support many of them. But there’s always been something to me about helping those on the outside—beyond the reach of a church, or those who missed the cut off. That’s often how I feel, like I’m forever missing the cut off. There’s something desperate but also beautifully hopeful about posting an ad for help that no one might ever see.

I am heartsick. And it’s not just about Paris or Beirut: it’s about us.  It’s about our response.

Most mornings, while we wait for the bus or just after it pulls away, I chat with a woman who just moved here from Paris. Mostly I ask questions, because I may have studied French for eight years, but certainly I’m no expert. France is her homeland, and she tells me about it. Most recently, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in her city, she grew agitated. Annoyed with her president, with the circumstances that allowed the attack, with the attack itself; she is angry. She is mourning.

But she said something that surprised me. “We don’t have the love that you have in America. We don’t have the respect. How was it after 9/11?”

I considered her question. “For about six months or so after 9/11, everyone was united. But then—I don’t know—it’s like we forgot how to do that, and it’s only gotten worse since then. We all see the same problems, but we see different solutions to them and we can’t manage to work together. We fight. We are divided.”

She blinked. She hasn’t been here long enough to see it that way. “But people who are different, different religion, they are treated well here?”

I winced. “Where I grew up, there were people of all races and cultures and religions, and it felt like there was space for them all. But there are places in this country where that’s not the case—where everybody looks the same and believes the same things—and there is often fear about those who are different. Things like this only make it worse.”

My friend nodded sadly. I looked down, sorry for her country, for what was taken from them on Friday, and with respect for what they still cling to.

And I was ashamed of us, such a young country, still thought to be such a bastion of ideals: we began to provide freedom for the politically and religiously oppressed. And yet.

​And yet last night I read what can only be described as vitriol from people I know, from people I love. Good people, who love their country and their mothers and their spouses and their kids. People with whom I disagree. One of them drove me to unfollow her, unsure my high opinion of her could survive her angry posting. Since I have spoken loudly and often of the merits of disagreeing well, I considered my response. Why was I upset?

Here it is: I do not begrudge her, or anyone else, the right to disagree with me. I don’t resent the disagreement itself, or even her position. I resent the speed and apparent thoughtlessness that led to it. 

​Maybe world leaders need to react quickly when disaster strikes. We are not world leaders.

Social media and twenty-four hour news have tricked us into thinking we must react immediately; we must share their outrage, we must make a statement—as if the masses are clamoring to hear it—as if we will be rendered irrelevant if we do not.

We will not.

We would do better to consider that if there were such simple solutions to the problems that ail our country and our world, they would likely have been instituted already. We would do better to be slower to speak, quicker to listen. We would do better to ask questions of those around us who are different, to fill the gaps of our assumptions with knowledge. We would do better to stop working so hard on the walls that divide us and devote some effort to uniting, or at least to coexisting peacefully as we process.


We can be angry without turning on each other.

We can be hurt without hurting others.

We can doubt and worry and wonder and search. It’s okay not to be sure about things.

Angry, fear-driven outbursts do not become us. Those of us who call ourselves Christians know better. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of  power and of love and of sound mind.” (1 Timothy 1:7 NKJV) Other translations replace “sound mind” with “self-control.”  Not just power, which alone can condemn and intimidate and overcome and divide. Not nationalism, or patriotism—not love only for those we deem worthy because they are like us—not knee-jerk, angry reactionary behavior, but power, and love, and sound mind.

I can understand how a tirade might feel like power. How listening, learning and reflecting can feel like weakness or how withholding judgment and gathering information might feel passive. But none of these is true. We don’t have to react immediately. We don’t have to be quick to blame. We don’t have to share the outrage of those around us.

In my heavy heart, which is troubled for all the same reasons yours probably is, I wrestle with shame and anger at the response of those of us who know better.

God has not given us a spirit of fear.

Someone else did that. And I will not accept it. And neither should you.

​We can choose to reject fear, to rest in the knowledge that we have been given a spirit of power and of love and of sound mind. Surely that will be enough to carry us through this darkness. It has to be.

Somebody I used to know just got married. I happened across a few pictures, and in them he and his lovely bride are radiant, glowing, silly with happiness. As they should be. I always hoped he would find a love like that. So I sat on my couch in the home I’ve made with the man I’ve loved for more than a decade, and I smiled, but a lump rose in my throat. It’s a complicated joy, but not for the reason you might think.

I remember beaming at my own wedding almost ten years ago, like I couldn’t smile broadly enough. But that day there was so much we didn’t know yet, we couldn’t have. That night I remember reading lovingly-written cards that mentioned the hard times inherent in marriage. Arrogantly, ignorantly I scoffed, “Why do people mention this stuff on your wedding day?” Now I write the cards that probably annoy brides.

Back then, I didn’t know the security I'd feel when those arms held me, not only in newly-wedded bliss, but through scarcity, sadness, loss and fear. I didn’t know that on other nights, with our backs turned, beside each other in our bed could be the loneliest place in the world.

I remember the realization that I couldn’t just flee to my apartment when we fought. The permanence of marriage is a salve, but it can also feel like a sentence.

I didn’t know the pride and closeness I would feel watching him parent our children, or raising a little boy with his eyes.

I couldn’t have known that I didn’t actually know him yet. It would be years before I realized that I chose to marry a man I hardly knew. When a friend, married 25 years, told me a story about her husband that started, “You know, the  more I get to know him…” I laughed. I didn’t understand we are ever pulling back layers, always discovering something new, always learning each other.

I thought I knew that he wouldn’t stay the same—that neither of us would. We are always finding the balance of letting go and pulling near, of giving each other space to become. We are learning not to hold each other to the people we were on that beautiful day in May, but to let each other grow.

I  didn’t know that my choice to marry him was actually the first of many; I couldn’t have understood that the act of choosing each other—over others, over alternate routes, over distraction, over dreams, over our children, over ourselves—is a daily act and sometimes a daily struggle.

I didn’t know how intense the daily care and feeding of a marriage could be. When people said marriage takes work, I assumed it meant occasional struggle, and while that is sometimes true, that’s not all of it. It’s also carving out space and demanding priority status for our love.
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I didn’t know how often it would feel like us against the world—the two of us, hands clasped—battling enemies real, perceived and invisible.

I underestimated how hard it would be, how sanctifying it is, yes. Sometimes I miss those days when we first fell in love, when we smiled so brightly in the pictures, but there’s something else I didn’t know.

I didn’t know about how life—even a really good, full, happy life—can crowd out love. I didn’t know we would crawl back to each other thousands of times, arms outstretched across the covers in the darkness. I didn’t know the joy of finding each other over and over again, or that choosing to fall in love with the same man throughout the years would be so much more precious than the first time around.

Here's to a lifetime of reaching and finding, choosing and falling. Our smiles might seem dimmer now, more knowing, but we're still just getting started. We're still learning what those promises meant, and that they are so much more beautiful than we could have known then.