Dear friends,
Do you have things in or adjacent to your life that you care deeply about but can’t change? I sure do.
I love my Afghan friends—deeply—but I am as helpless as they are to change Taliban rule in their home countries or even to sway my own government to act on their behalf. I also love—again, deeply—my Congolese friends, but I cannot change what is happening at the border between Rwanda and DRC or the greediness of Western countries who have taken advantage of their resources for years. Same for my Eritrean, Nepali, Syrian, Mexican, Ethiopian friends and others.
This separation between what I can do and what I cannot do is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of my personal limitations.
And then there are the limitations I’ve come to embrace as part of the human experience. I remember sobbing on the way home from the ICU for a short night’s sleep and asking God, “Why did you make my body fall apart without sleep?” because I wanted to stay awake at my husband’s side for every last second we had together.
I’ve learned to say “I’m limited” instead of “I’m busy,” because I am really not all that busy, but if my calendar doesn’t figure in rest, family time, reading, and a spell of quiet, then what I have to give is subpar (or worse, unhealthy).
So, I have to ask, what is left when we strip away the “outside of our control” pieces of our lives, no matter how loud and heartbreaking those pieces are? I do know this: If I don’t forgive, love, care about, sacrifice for, treat with tenderness the people whose names and faces I know, I will not have the capacity to genuinely care about the bigger, less personal things.
Finally, my job is to forgive, love, care about, sacrifice for, and to treat others with tenderness. It is not my job to “make” anyone else do that. How’s that for big ole, immovable limitation? I happen to think my job is herculean. And so is yours.
This morning, I can’t help but add this poem, one I’ve sent before but find especially meaningful today:
I Cheerfully Refuse
(With apologies to Leif Enger,
whose book by the same title
isn’t about the subject of this poem at all)
I cheerfully refuse
to pretend I can do
more than I can do.
I have only
so much time,
so much capacity,
so much energy,
(and my “so much”
is shrinking,
not to extinction,
but noticeably,
and is therefore
so much
more precious).
I cheerfully refuse
to expend any
of this capacity
making war,
war within my own soul
or yours.
War is the enemy,
not the people who
wage it, and so
I cheerfully refuse
the fundamentalist
playbook used
by sides.
I cheerfully refuse
the accusation
that by being
a generalist
on the side of
humanity instead
of human constructs
places me
in the middle
and means
I am spineless,
side-less,
powerless,
living inside
an echo chamber.
I cheerfully refuse
to ignore
the complexities
inherent in the pursuit
of simplicity,
and I cheerfully refuse
the premise
that I am sidestepping
toil and adversity.
(I may be cheerful,
but I am resolute,
and I pay
a certain price for this,
a cost that mere words
don’t usually exact.)
I cheerfully refuse
to expend my corpus
of diminished competence
on causes and
inflammatory words
and cancellations
instead of on
people whose existence
is proved to me daily
by empirical evidence,
having gazed into
the singular prism of
a pair of eyes
and having listened
to the matchless
waves of sound
one voice can send
to my tender eardrums.
And having done
this research,
I cheerfully refuse
to spend
whatever is leftover
on anything,
singular or
collective—
questionable
or not—
unless I
can be sure
it will
bring peace.
Finally,
I refuse to
define peace
by any means
except love.
Let’s meet in our limitations with limitless love,
Kitti
P.S. – The quote below was written in response to the forgiveness (in the form of letters and a gofundme) the Church of the Latter-Day Saints offered to the family of the man who killed their church members in Michigan last week. I’m stunned.
