Social Justice 2
Mending the Divides Introduction. for SheLoves Magazine Red Couch Book Club.
The roar of a mob of students fills my ears as I try to read. I walk over to my window to watch the protestors filing down the street carrying signs and chanting slogans about corrupt governments and unsafe roads. This isn’t an unusual occurrence. In our sprawling city, protests often shut down the roads for days and remind us of the conflict raging all around us. Some days it can feel overwhelming. Where is my voice in the din? I don’t belong on the streets with the local students. Do I have a say at all? Can there ever be peace?
Living in a majority Muslim country, some might think I live in a place that sees more conflict than most. I am not sure anymore. I see just as much conflict these days on my computer screen, from the voices in my home country, in the news coming out of Western culture. As I sat down to read Mending the Divides: Creating Love in a Conflicted World my heart ached with the truth of Lynne Hybel’s words in the introduction describing my own home country as one “increasingly polarized into divisive factions, even at war with itself.”
I wanted to read Mending the Divides because of the increasing conflict I see in the world and my adjacent feelings of powerlessness. What can I possibly do to help? I knew the authors, Jon Huckins and Jer Swigart, to be the founders of the Global Immersion Project. Through peacemaking workshops, webinars, and immersion trips their organization seeks to train individuals and organizations how to be everyday peacemakers in the world.
But peace—really? How can we have any part in such a lofty concept?...
How do you feel about being a peacemaker? Do you feel like you have any place in mending the divides in this world?
Join me at SheLoves for The Red Couch Introduction to Mending the Divides and enter this vital discussion about how we can be a part of the transformation that comes on the other side of interpersonal, local, and international conflict.
Why I Amplify Their Stories. For Sheloves Magazine.
I feel the tension every time I open my computer and am bombarded with need on every side. My news feed is filled with pictures of families fleeing from rising waters and stories of refugees flooding into the no man's land between countries. There are a thousand different appeals for funds, for volunteers, for someone—anyone—to see the need and care.
As I dive into nonprofit work, I feel like I am swallowed in the sea of hurt before I even begin. I recently had the opportunity to engage with others working around the world in places where people are in great distress. We had time to talk together about our work and it was encouraging to be with others who understand what it’s like to be surrounded by difficult circumstances while clinging to the hope that change can happen. We also had the opportunity to share with the members of the large church about what life is like for those in our respective countries .
I argue I am a writer, not a speaker. I prefer telling a story in the relative obscurity of a coffee shop, safe behind my computer screen than to a live crowd with a lack of editing time. But as I’ve spoken more frequently about the new role I am taking on and the stories of the dire conditions in the country where we are moving, I’ve found it easier to get lost in the narrative as I tell it, to let my passion for the urgency take over. I see the eyes of the children who work instead of going to school, their hands becoming calloused as they roll cigarettes and lay brick. I feel the ache of the woman who has lost two children and been cast aside, shamed and penniless though barely out of her teens. I hurt because I have seen the faces behind the tragedies. To me, they aren’t just statistics of child labor and child marriage, or lives without hope. To me, they are children whose hands I have held in similar circumstances. They are the people I will call neighbor and friend.
But to those listening, these stories are tales of another faceless need. They are just another woe in a sea of sad sagas woven by all of us who are doing what we can to help...
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