We are a people offended.
Especially now, because we live in a world where all of us in some way have lost out.
Lost out from the way we expected life to be right now.
How we expected life to be this year.
Nothing is normal anywhere, and not only our day to day but even the small details, even our conversations seem to have changed permanently.
And you cannot hide from it. This is what it is for as long as this is what it is.
There.
Is.
No.
Escape.
And it can be overwhelming, especially when we are in a season of restrictions because restrictions from things often means restrictions from coping mechanisms and distractions.
Sometimes when I’ve had a big day, I’ll just go to the Warehouse for a wander.
Sometimes when I’ve had a toddler have a particularly toddler day I just need to see a friend.
But I can’t, not just for like the next 24 Hours, but sort of indefinitely.
And look, I’ll be honest with you, sometimes I’m cool with it, but other times I feel pretty feral about the whole thing and I suspect I’m not the only one.
What I’ve found rather curious is the way people (and myself) have responded.
Because we all have different types of skin in the game, and have all had loss in different ways.
Some of us have jobs where we are able to work from home, calls are diverted and everything we accomplish is on a computer, so aside from having to keep some kids at bay, we are able to work and earn.
Others of us have jobs where we physically have to go somewhere, to fix something, or complete some type of work – so working from home isn’t an option at all. So we are languishing waiting for advice from the employer on what ‘a longer lockdown’ actually means.
Others have three kids who each have three different home schooling schedules, who might be dealing with their own emotional outcome from this whole thing, and struggling and actually getting them upright to complete their school work is an absolute mission and underlyingly it worries us because we are concerned it will impact them for years.
And others have teenagers who couldn’t care less, who facetime their friends, and complete their school work, and we’re able to work easily with no distractions because they’re self sufficient in the most part.
Others are planning weddings, or tying to, and this big day they’ve dreamed of for months or perhaps years are in the most part up in the air and its stressful and upsetting.
Some of us have newly minted family members who they aren’t able to see, and you know deep down you’ll never get that time back, and that this is a loss that will be a forever loss, and it hurts to experience it but you feel like you shouldn’t because you’re letting down the ‘Team of Five Million’.
Or others hear that term ‘Team of Five Million’ and it causes your brown to furrow and eyes to roll because you’ve never heard anything more condescending, because it doesn’t feel like a team at all. It feels like you’re not being hear or listened to, it feels like your struggles and hurts and grief and exhaustion doesn’t matter, and that not only doesn’t it matter but there’s little else than a virtue signaling help line you can call if you’re feeling overwhelmed, which feels laughable since our mental health care system is so woefully under funded that it can barely deal with the people who have profound issues, let alone those who are experiencing minor ‘blip’ because of this whole thing.
We’ve all got different skin in the game.
Each of us has experienced this shift in a very different way, with different tints and shades and colours.
The difficulty is that these days people have become way more inclined towards facing most things with a sense of dichotomy.
Dichotomy is a flash way of saying ‘this or that’, it means that things have been split down the middle and its either this thing over here or it is that thing over there.
An inclination towards dichotomy means that we turn particular people into heroes, and others into villains, and in doing that we build them into these perfect individuals who we can never imagine letting us down.
An inclination towards dichotomy means that we take the feelings of those who don’t agree with us and pack them into a box labelled ‘silly and thoughtless’ and we make no space to hear or understand why there may even be a tiny bit of validity to what they are saying.
I have been thinking about this recently through the lockdowns and Covid responses, but also in and around Afghanistan.
It is hideous, genuinely hideous. Days ago now, when I first saw those images from Kabul Airport, it gutted something very deeply inside me. Instantly, I thought for the women there, who knew that life changed for them from this moment forward, forever. Education, freedom, choices – all of that went on the chopping board.
I thought for the people, so desperate to escape that they were climbing on the wheels of planes, or air-gates, in huge crowds of absolute terror induced hysteria.
I thought for people in their early twenties who had never really experienced life as it was going to become, how strange and terrifying that must be, to know everything would be different now, and instead would be in the pattern of this awful kind of life their parents may have told them about in whispers tainted with relief that their world wasn’t ruled by Toyota Hilux driving men with guns.
And I suppose what really, really astonished me was the response of the politicians involved. Biden – slow to return from his summer vacation at Camp David when this crisis was one that to everyone appeared as one that should have completely justified an immediate statement or response. A president who when asked by a reporter what the game plan would be if there were still people who needed to be gotten out there on the 31st of August, he smirked and replied ‘you’ll be the first person I call.’
And these weren’t news articles I read on some weird right wing network – this was CNN, this was BBC.
It boggled my mind, because in last year’s dichotomy this was the man who would redeem America.
He and Ms. Harris his VP, they were meant to be these saint-like individuals who redeemed the errors and silliness of the Trump era.
I remember the Instagram posts in the lead up and the following of the Americans elections. I remember friends posting these artistic pictures, and quotes, and empowering tributes to Saint Biden and Saint Harris who would never allow terrified people to clamber across tarmacs and smirk at the idea of people being stuck in a situation that was one of genuine fear.
And I don’t say this to point to a dichotomy, to say that they’re baddies, or goodies, but to say that when we stand in a place where we split things so bluntly down the middle, we remove space to understand in a way that is wholistic and proper.
My year two Art Teacher died earlier this week of sudden and aggressive cancer.
And do you know what the first thought on my mind was? I hope she wasn’t aware of the lockdown. I really don’t.
Because yeah, we all like to think if faced with the same thing, we would face it like some brave, strong person who was completely okay with putting our own needs and expectations and desires on the altar to sacrifice for the ‘Team of Five Million’, but imagine dying knowing you wouldn’t have a funeral?
Oh sure, you’ll eventually have a funeral. The same thing happened to one of my nana’s closest friends, and they held a funeral for her on the year anniversary of her passing.
But it isn’t the same.
Funerals are a part of the grief. A part of the process, they are intrinsic I believe to moving through the long path of processing loss.
My Art Teacher would have been ten, twenty, fifty years old, and it never would have been called into question her family would have been allowed the space and opportunity to celebrate and grieve like that.
I can’t imagine how suffocating that would have been, knowing you’ll be gone soon, and the loss of you will be parceled up into a box, tucked quietly away, in silence, until ‘the right time’.
If faced with the same thing, I wouldn’t feel heroic, I don’t think. I think it would make passing a lot harder and more traumatic. So yeah, I hope she didn’t know.
Dichotomies help no one.
Because in light of a dichotomy of course we tell the dying woman to suck it up, and understand her sacrifice.
In dichotomies we put all of our eggs and chickens into the one basket, and refuse to understand or give headspace to the other.
We face this whole thing thinking:
If you care about businesses surviving and needing to open up so those who cannot work can work…
… you don’t care about lives. You want people to die. You are inhumane.
If you care about lives, and people, regardless of their age not succumbing to this virus…
… you don’t care about the economy of the country. You don’t think of the small to medium business owners who hold up the economy we live in, who are already under pressure as a result of the pressure on supply of products at the ports, the absolute blood bath that is the labour market and trying to recruit staff, the introduction of a new public holiday they have to find money for, the introduction of more sick leave that means yeah, it is hard for them.
It means you believe the hows and whats that the government has been rolling out is absolutely beyond perfection. That those in power have done no wrong, and that anyone who says otherwise is a hater…
… or else that the government is terrible, and no one in power has done anything sensible and you cannot stand the idea that they have made a single right choice.
And so we become people, posting overly styled pictures on our Instagram stories, turning people, and choices, and opinions into Saints.
But this is a difficult and dangerous place to be, because when we look at life from the perspective of dichotomy, we turn off all empathy, and all preparation to do what Atticus Finch so wisely told Scout to do in To Kill A Mocking Bird – which is to stand and see life from another’s perspective.
And that is what I’ve been trying, personally to do this time around.
I’ve got lots of skin in the game. And I’m also the sort of person who goes down the empathy rabbit hole and feels all the skin that other people have in the game.
And we need to validate and value our experiences, but also the experiences of others, and wherever we can stop and step back and ask ourselves ‘am I sanctifying this?’
We live in a world where social media rallies us, and the news rallies us and we all take our sides in this battle field of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and it is all a bit like that Dr. Seuss book about what side you butter your toast on.
And look, I know this post isn’t over theological, but I believe in the core it is theological.
Because as Christians we know that the thing that causes this compass spin from ‘This’ to ‘That’ is our internal drive towards shalom.
Shalom, meaning rightness, or peace, or things as they ought to be.
But we also need to understand that was are this side of heaven. That things aren’t perfect, and that brokenness takes all shapes and sizes and rather than use that intrinsic drive to turn things into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ to mean that we become people who turn particular beliefs and peoples into ‘Mini-Saviours.’
Nothing, no answer, solution, or person is going to be the Messiah.
Nothing, no answer, solution or person is going to be perfect.
And as soon as we lock ourselves into a position of someone who pursues dichotomy, of ‘this’ and ‘that’, I believe we move ourselves away from the ability to hear, listen, and value the opinions, experiences and skin in the game of others.
There is a true dichotomy, there always was. We see this pattern throughout scripture:
This dichotomy is one between holiness and sin.
Between God and away from God.
Between goodness and evil.
And this dichotomy bleeds through the other stuff, through the Biden Instagram posts, the ‘Team of Five Millions’ and the delayed funerals, and sacrifices and the trying to work while three kids fight over the TV remote.
But the true compass is in Christ, and in God and what he says, and I can guarantee you that it doesn’t fall neatly into the divides that we have created.
As a result of that, we need to be people, who set their sights on heaven, on Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith, and be those willing to deal gently with others who see things differently to ourselves.
brighteyesbigworld 