It's early here... 4:30am is not a time I would normally choose to witness. A combination of health issues and their treatments leading to extreme anxiety and insomnia, the news, and projects that I want to complete to show my love and support for people who will likely be equally reeling as today dawns...

I'm finally understanding more clearly how we are ending up here. In all the heres in my life, there is much in common. Abuse is dismissed as inevitable and incurable. Children are taught unquestioning compliance as a spiritual discipline. Shame is weaponized to assert control. And liability... economy... money... dollars... are spoken of as the most important marker of success. Both within the church and beyond into the political arena, from dear people who don't live as if the words they speak are true as well as from those who very clearly exhibit the exact things they say, this is an echoing refrain.

This won't be the baseline for normal my children grow up with. I will do all I can to lay a different foundation. One that normalizes the ability and responsibility to change. Change is human. It's terrifying, and hard, and heavy... but I will not go back to settling for compliance over connection. I will not go back to being silent to keep a peace that was never truly made. I will work in all the ways in which I am called to seek shalom by the abolishment of systems of oppression and violence that have become the status quo.

The Church I was raised in and raised by is not the Church of the Nazarene. It was a collection of people who believed that holiness was possible as that denomination used to believe... not as it currently is exhibiting. It was a ragtag band of people who found for generations that humans were essential, gave freedom for the care and keeping of those humans, and united in the belief that it was God who did the perfecting... not the rules.

Since that faith tradition no longer exists, I will seek to find or create the healthy and healing community that is so desperately needed to combat the brokenness that has taken over. I will live love out loud in all the ways possible for all the people I can so that the legacy I leave reflects the work of all those who have paved the track so I could learn to fly over the hurdles and cross the finish line.

You can agree or disagree. Your opinions, your thoughts, your ideas, your story, your lived experiences are valuable and I am more than willing to hold space for you to share them. No judgement, regardless of what you have to say. We don't have to agree to sit and talk. It's often in the safety of a calm conversation that we can learn what unites us instead of just being told what divides us.

I'm here if you need to talk something through, cry something out, work something over, or just sit in silence in a space where you aren't alone. You're welcome to show up just as you are.

For now, I am practicing what I "preach"

Lowering my shoulders

Relaxing my eyebrows

Dropping the tongue from the roof of my mouth

Loosening my stomach

Hand on my heart...

And breathing slowly and deeply, feeling the beating or purpose in my chest, believing that good things happen, love is real, and we will be okay.

The sun is just beginning to brighten the sky outside. And as it spreads its warmth to the far reaches of the spaces around the globe where my people are, I send my love on its rays.

May this day be what you need it to be. May you speak love even if your voice cracks. May you recognize a moment in which you know that you are loved and loveable and invincibly precious.

Because you are.

I love you.