What does it mean to have deep convictions if one doesn’t act on them? Faith without works is dead. Truth is a funny thing. Like the tree falling alone in the forest, is truth unspoken equally powerless?
Finding your voice is about believing in your worth.
Rev. Lee Ann Bryce, First Congregational Church
Leave it to the Boss to speak the plain truth to power. In a recent concert in Europe, he said these words unabashedly:
In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.
In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.
In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers, they’re rolling back historic Civil Rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society, they’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom.
They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.
Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy, says:
A world with more justice, more compassion, is a more beautiful world.
He adds to speaking for mercy the importance of proximity; that we must be close to a thing to draw importance to it. Drawing attention to a cause from a distance draws no one. As he says, we must be proximate. I’m reminded of the inherently splintering nature of social media and how it pales to showing up in person to make a movement work.
Why, Stevenson asks, do we see to add suffering to suffering? Why seek to destroy what is already broken? The powers that be that making all that is happening now have no hope. Those that have given up on mercy and justice are hopeless.
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