Some want to protect the precious human life here, in their own homes.
Some want to protect the precious human life in other countries who need a safe place or a chance for a better life.
Some want to protect the working class citizens in our country to make sure they can maintain the standard of living for their families.
It's all about people. Wanting people to be ok and safe. We actually agree on something: life matters. This is big.
I hope we can all take a minute and realize just how big this is. We ALL agree life is more important than money, than progress, than differences of opinion, than stuff, than ....fill in the blank.
You have no idea how much this realization makes my heart soar. In a world that sometimes seems so confused and lost, we have still not really forgotten the most important thing embedded deep into our souls: we matter.
So why are we still fighting? I believe it's because some of us disagree about how to best protect EACH human life, and because some of us might disagree about who needs protecting. I don't have the answers. I know our leaders and representatives have spent hundreds of hours contemplating and researching the solutions and I have just read a few articles online.
I do know, as I pray for our country and our world, my prayer is that we stop seeing problems and start seeing people. Because we agree, people matter. And if we make decisions always keeping the person in mind, we will do the best we can with this broken world.
We are foster parents, and we deal constantly with a social services system and court system that sometimes fail to see children as individual people.
Unfortunately, our systems seem to think emotion needs to be removed when making these types of decisions. We've heard it often from case workers and attorneys "emotionally remove myself."
And when that happens, when we remove emotion, we stop seeing people. We see cases, numbers, files, statistics. We don't see individuality, futures, feelings, hearts. How can we make decisions about people, who are clearly made with emotion, without emotion? Maybe we have emotion for a reason, because what would our existence really be like without it?
Whether it's our foster children, refugee children, immigrants or inmates, they all just become another statistic. Our foster son who lived with us his whole first year of life who was moved a few months ago, he is just another file on a big stack of paperwork in someone's office. He is just more work that someone with a big case load doesn't have time to do. But to us he is everything, he is a son, brother, grandson, nephew. He lights up our world. His laugh is incredible, his smile is like no other. He will never be duplicated again on this earth.
You see statistics about police officers but I see my sister-in-law who won't fully exhale until her officer-husband returns home from his evening shift to their 5 children.
You see statistics about illegal immigrants but I won't ever forget the fear in a young girls eyes as she told me the instructions she has from her parents should they ever not come home from work one day.
See, we group things that are alike, that's how we make statistics. But no two people really are, so every grouping fails us. Every statistic tells us the lie that certain people might be replaceable, might be the same. We are emotionally removed from people we've never met, stories we've never heard. We don't see brothers, sons, sisters, daughters, here in America needing protection, across the border needing safety, and across the world dying for our help.
We emotionally remove ourselves. Especially in this age where so many heart-wrenching situations can reach us each day through our phones and computers, we emotionally check-out as a means of self preservation.
BUT, will you ponder with me today, if we agree that life matters, if we agree that there is no more precious thing on this planet, then lets make the effort to emotionally invest today. Lets make the effort to care about that life. And maybe, the heart of the problem might not be that we don't care about other lives, but that we care about our own just a little more. But if we believe what I think we believe: that we deserve to live, that we deserve to be cared about, that we matter....then doesn't that mean my brother next to me matters and deserves the same? Then doesn't that mean someone's son across the ocean or the border deserves the same?
Maybe you can't possibly care for my little boy or think you can help a police officer or a refugee from so far away. But could you be the change that our world needs, by taking the time to care about someone even though it's not your responsibility? Because I think if we really lived like other people matter, the people right around us, in our families, at the office, in the community, I think we really could be the solution.
Let's stop saying it's not our problem. Let's stop blaming politicians. Let's start noticing individuals for their uniqueness and realizing another like them will never ever exist again. And then treat them like they are that precious. Because they are.
A year ago, when Tiny was just a few weeks old, I was visited by a new friend who had recently lost her 22 year old son. She told me his story and all of the lives he had impacted with his loving heart and endless generosity in just 22 short years. And as she looked at Tiny, laying there sleeping, she waved her hand toward him and said how clearly she could remember the day her son lay there just like that as a newborn baby and doctors said because of his health issues he would "never amount to anything." Her voice cracked and tears rolled as she said those words. But he proved them wrong. He showed them God had a purpose for him, and in his short life, he loved more than most people ever do in their long ones. His family never gave up on him, and because of it, the whole world is a better place. (Read more about him here: Scott's Impact)
I keep thinking back to that image of him, sleeping on the bench on our deck on a warm fall day. My friend saw HIM that day. Not just a child, not a case, but a unique boy and she could imagine the impact that he could make. She would challenge all of you today to know the difference that you can make in this world, and to do the little things or the big things that you have been put here for. She would quote St. Catherine of Sienna "Be who you were meant to be and you will set the world on fire."
Maybe, there's someone you can chose to care about today. Choose to emotionally invest. Choose to give your time to care about. We really need you too. We can all agree on that.
