What is your level of buy in?
What is your willingness to seek truth?
What standard will you hold?
These are all questions that filled my head this morning. As I read the accounts of people booing and disrespecting the POTUS I am struck with the hypocrisy of it all. Have we truly become a people, a culture, a country that is incapable of not projecting our anger, distrust, frustration, confusion onto another. I have been an architect for going on 30 years and the business of construction is difficult on a good day. Putting together a team, creating a design, implementing that design, finishing well are all hindered by circumstances out of our control. I am currently involved in a project where the level of frustration is acute. There is a clear obstacle preventing our team from finishing our work for a multi-million dollar structure. The obstacle is known and acknowledged by all involved except the one who is the obstacle. My level of anger and frustration is palpable, real, raw and at times misused. I have made mistakes which have injured my standing within the team and weakened my voice to speak up about this issue. I have had my client berate me, yell at me, support me. I have said things about the obstacle within our team that have been mean and disrespectful, questioning the others integrity and value. It is easy to take this posture because I feel I have been wronged, even with the mistakes I have made.
We have become a people who speak evil of others, to others, over others without care for the damage it does. I do not mean the clear overt damage this spoken evil can impart but more of the subtle ways it infiltrates our minds, our hearts, our words. We think it funny that people chant “lock him up” at a baseball game. We think it is acceptable because it has been to done to us and to others by the one being chanted to. You see the problem with it all is that we become a people who inoculate our hearts, our minds to the affects of this spoken evil. This “us and them” world will bring us all down. This “us and them” culture will reap a harvest of hardship and strife. It is easy to accept, to listen to, to love those who act like you, who think like you, who smell like you, who look like you. It takes effort and thought and patience and selflessness to see it differently. In a book I cherish and respect and believe it says to, “speak evil of no one”. That sentence does not say one whom us dislike, distrust, disagree with, it says no one. It is easy, maybe simple to dismiss this idea, yet for me it is the stuff of love, of life, of peace, of joy, of acceptance. To dismiss these words comes easy when you see the world through your own lens, through your own pain, through our own thoughts. Yet, we are made for more than that banal view of life.
Those simple words can transform a person, a city, a culture, a world, but we have to let them, we have to want them to. We have to have an active invested stake in the transforming. I have made a decision to believe these words, to let them inform, to shape, to enliven, to challenge how I speak about others. My words can destroy or they can give life. My thoughts behind those words, the ideas that form those words, the patterns that frame those words must adapt. I must let those five words become the stuff of my lens, my filter, my heart. I must be willing to let go of my desire to speak evil of others no matter the wrong they do or have done, no matter how they oppose me, no matter how they act. Yes, injustice, evil, hate, selfishness must be vanquished but we do not need to speak evil of others to see this happen.
I am going to raise my standard, my accountability, my respect of those obstacles, those who oppose me, those you seek to hinder. Will you join me?