It’s been about a year since #metoo went viral, and I’ve been wondering if, right here in the midst of this perpetual-open-mic-night, we’re somehow overlooking a holy invitation.
You see, it’s a funny thing that’s happened. Recognizing our justice system has failed us, we’ve moved conversations out of courtrooms and into the court of public opinion. And while I believe it is healthy to talk about topics that have long been taboo, I look around and wonder if we’re moving our mouths but missing the point.
At the end of the day, you can have a thousand conversations about the facts of a situation without grasping a central truth . . . that at the core of these stories there is a lot of suffering, suffering that that we are too uncomfortable to digest.
And I wonder, as I consider what has happened over the past year, if the invitation we are offered now is the opportunity to sit with that suffering, to sit with it without turning away, without opening our mouths, without turning it into a political free-for-all. I wonder if the opportunity is to sit with the suffering and begin to know some truth.
I think it is a fair and accepted statement that our mouths can betray us, our bodies can betray us, our decisions can betray us. Sometimes our instinct is to live and speak fiction because we think we must do so to survive. But just because we say something is acceptable and live as if it is acceptable does not mean that it is acceptable. And so our souls suffer, though we can be so absorbed in such fiction that we do not understand why.
What I want you to understand as I type this is that when a person says #metoo, that person is uttering a soul level cry. Not every #metoo will meet our fallible definition of crime, but that does not indicate the absence of a violation. Sit with the suffering and you will see: the soul speaks truth that society often denies.
This #metoo invitation . . . the chance to sit with the suffering: it is not convenient; it is not for the faint of heart. There is a good chance that when you spend too much time with the broken that you will discover that you too are broken, that you have been living lies, that you have even perpetuated brokenness. And even if you are not broken, what you see might break your heart.
You might never be the same.
So it’s a dangerous invitation, a scary invitation, a world-changing invitation.
It’s an invitation to know the heart of Christ.
Melissa says
I love this so much!