This Post is My Repentance
It’s been a week of storms here on Harvester Island. And everywhere the media reaches, it’s been a week of verbal storms: invective, labels, insults, threats. Most of the words were from politicians, but a few of the words were mine, coming from my own mouth. This post is my act of repentance.
As we speak, so the world becomes. How well I know this! How well I remember living in the vortex of violent words and acts, feeling their bruises, hearing their destructive echoes for decades. And yet how easily I fall into the same. How easily bitterness finds me and speaks through me. How quickly fear curdles my speech. How stealthily past hurts rise up to twist my words. (Does this ever happen to you too? Oh how such words rend and wreck the world!)
But I can choose otherwise. We can all choose otherwise.
The last two nights, when the wind ceased and the waters slept, I needed to hear another kind of speech. Silently I slid my kayak into the waters around Harvester Island. I paddled and drifted and listened and opened my heart to all that was around me.
And in the gorgeous fiery force of this be-spoken world---uttered by Love into matter and being and cradled by His presence still---I remembered: THIS is my story. The wicked political blasts are not my story. The past is not my story. Rescue is my story. Peace is my story.
And it is. Recently I revised a story I had written years before, about a nearly miraculous bus ride up a mountain in a blizzard. My siblings and I trudged up and down that impossibly-steep mile long mountain road every morning and afternoon to catch the bus at the bottom. No one ever gave us a ride, no matter the weather. But this day, in this blizzard, on this treacherous road the bus driver was risking everything to drive four ill-dressed kids up the mountain safely to their door? Yes. I was filled with a radiant light. That day, Mrs. Fifield carried us up the mountain.
It could be a story about something else. It’s easy to find bitterness and blame behind those miraculous moments and so many others. But as I continue to write into and out of my life, I am learning to give this up: interrogating the past as a means to accuse. Yes, we all need to wrestle with the truths of our story, however long it takes, but after that--- go after peace. Chase mercy. Wage grace.
I repent of my un-grace-filled words this week. I send you these instead.
Imagine the world we can create if we each unleash words and stories that forge out of violence --luminous grace, out of bitterness and blame ----miraculous radiant peace?
Dear friends, Let us do more than imagine it!
What are some ways you, us, all of us, can speak goodness into the world this week?
