Jewish Voice for Peace
Protesters hold hands locked together during a Jewish Voice for Peace rally that shut down the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building while demanding that Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war Friday, Nov. 3, 2023, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Special to United Methodist Insight
My bleeding heart flows with compassion—
For children being deported from the only home they’ve ever known...
For Black neighbors who tell their kids not to be themselves around certain people...
For Palestinians who want to go back home to bury family members buried beneath the rubble of genocide...
For my LGBTQ brothers and sisters who feel they’ll never be welcomed by people who won’t even acknowledge their existence...
For poor folks trying to survive on the streets after all their worldly possessions are thrown in the dumpster by cities that refuse to allow them to simply exist...
For Ukrainian families who just want to live in peace in their own home country...
For children dying from famine in Sudan after learning their only source of food has been cut off by the world’s richest man, who has the resources to end world hunger himself but instead has been empowered to starve them by a President who thinks their country is a “shithole”...
For senior citizens trying to decide which hurts worse, not running their heat in the winter or not taking their meds, worried their Social Security benefits will be sacrificed for another tax cut for billionaires and large corporations...
For children scared to go to school in a country with more guns than people and prioritizes 2nd Amendment rights over their right to live past 15.
My bleeding heart also flows with compassion for my fellow Americans—
Who believe our country’s greatest weakness is her diversity instead of her greatest strength...
Who believe leadership looks like dominating and annihilating enemies, zero-sum, kill or be killed, ends justifies the means, and might makes right politics, rather than humble service for the good of all...
Who believe trickle-down economics has ever nourished hard-working families living paycheck to paycheck instead of further fattening the bank accounts of those with more than they can spend in a lifetime...
Who believe the answer to our problems lies in controlling people through violence—another war, more policing, bigger prisons, more guns in more hands, mass deportations...
Who believe they have special privileges for being born American, male, white, straight, Christian, or wealthy...
Who believe people must be forced into made-up either/or categories to create order...
Who believe that any difference they can concoct—gender, skin color, ethnicity, country of origin, religious affiliation, employment status, preference of partner, socioeconomic class, favorite sportsball team, relationship status, etc. ad infinitum—actually separates them from any other living being on this planet or even the Earth itself...
Whose religious faith is shallow enough to believe their community is God’s chosen people while everyone else is condemned to burn in an eternal lake of fire, and who fail to swim into a deeper current that flows through all the world’s religions—that God is Love; that loving others is loving God; and in that great cosmic Love, we are all One, and anything that affects one of us affects us all.
We need each other.
We need to listen to each other.
Especially to those who are different than us.
And those with whom we disagree.
Because iron sharpens iron.
We hold the answers of each others’ questions.
You know what’s Diverse?
Creation. The universe. Being itself.
You know what’s Equitable?
Grace. Generative abundance.
You know what’s Inclusive?
The Gospel. God is Love.
You know who this is Accessible to?
Everybody. Truly, everybody.
All deserve dignity—to have their basic needs met.
All deserve safety.
All deserve belonging.
All deserve joy.
All deserve love.
No one is more deserving or more worthy of these than anyone else.
All are equally loved—fellow image bearers of the divine.
To deny this is to deny the reality of God’s infinite love.
When compassion becomes weakness,
When empathy becomes a sin,
When mercy becomes a missed opportunity for cruelty,
When love is commodified, and we’re lulled to sleep by sirens of comfort and convenience,
We have lost our way.
My bleeding heart flows with compassion for us.