Have We Become Fragile?

Looking around today, you may have noticed that the world seems like it’s not doing so well. There are so many concerning issues that that point is not even in question. Instead, our question today is; how are you handling it? I mean, things aren’t great out there, but are they the worst they’ve ever been throughout history? Our plights today are certainly a challenge, and our pains are truly pain, but is our response to pain proportional to the causes of those pains, especially when considering the plights and pains of others? Or, has our ability to withstand become lesser over the generations. Are we less equipped to deal with difficulty and, if so, how did we get here and how do we get out? Have we become fragile? That is the question we will be discussing today. 

So, have we become fragile? Even the question itself might cause offense to rise up in you. Some of you watching will automatically bristle at it and, in your mind, already have started throwing up justifications as to why your situation is unique, why your struggles exempt you, why your experiences should excuse your state and behavior. Now, please don’t hear any of this in the wrong way, we are not saying that your experiences don’t matter or that your pain is illegitimate. What we are saying, however, is that when left unchecked, our real past pains can evolve into a lifelong crippling identity that, rather than seeking healing for, we instead find solace in. When we allow others to identify us by our struggles, or when that is how we choose to identify ourselves, we are automatically creating a category in our minds which limits our ability to move beyond that barrier. There are countless ways in which each one of us has been truly hurt, wounded, traumatized, and those hurts, wounds, and traumas start to build the paradigm in which we view the world and interpret our experiences through.  

Our modern western culture has, almost exclusively, bought into this lie; that our most core and meaningful identifiers are the ways in which we have been wounded. We are taught and encouraged to stack our grievances, one on top of the other, and those grievances have now become a form of social currency with which we can earn exceptions for personal behavior and responsibility. This process has taken different forms over the years, its most current incarnation is known as intersectionality, and in the guise of equalizing outcomes and helping the less fortunate, it instead has given carte blanche for a new wave of racism, sexism, classism and more, but it’s all actually encouraged because it is being directed at those considered to be “privileged.” In our modern American context, we may find it easy enough to compare one person or group to another and make sweeping generalizations declaring one group as advantaged while the other is disadvantaged, and we could be typically correct in those narrow margins. We often hear about the 1% not paying their fair share and that their wealth should rightfully be redistributed down to the rest of us. We also hear about inequality in areas of gender, race, age, and a million other things, but again, we are dealing with a very specific group of people, in a specific place and time. If we broaden all of this out to a global scale, if you live in the U.S., you are the economic upper class of the world whether you consider yourself rich, middle class or poor. How many of your assets are you willing to hand over so that the literal starving in other nations can be fed? Would it be right for them to demand that the government start taking your money by force and sending it to them? To an extent, that does already happen, but the type of redistribution many of us are calling for in our own country would be far more intrusive and costly than anything we are currently experiencing. That also doesnt consider time. As difficult as things are in many places around the world today, nearly all of us have it far easier and more comfortable than almost every human that has ever lived prior to the last 150 years. Again, none of this is saying that your pain or mine is not real, but we have to understand that while pain is relative and subjective, how we respond to it is a different matter altogether. 

Perspective can help us avoid becoming overly focused on ourselves and buried underneath all of our perceived inequalities. Some of you might be watching and think to yourselves, “That’s easy for you to say, you’re white. Others might give my words more weight than Jerrod’s because, although he is not white, he is a man and my boss, so he obviously has more privilege. None of those perceptions, however, hold any bearing on the actual lives that either of us have lived. Watching us in these videos does not allow any of you the opportunity to see and know who either of us are or what we have been through, and life is very much like that. We are all only seeing small portions of a person’s and most of us will never truly know what that person has been through. There are many things that each of us prefer not to air out in public about all of the hurt we have been through, but that should allow us the opportunity to extend grace rather than count up intersectionality points. When we are constantly focusing on our own negative experiences, we train ourselves to process everything through the lens of those negative experiences. We define ourselves and everything else based off of things we cannot control, which then causes us to feel as if everything is out of our control. This removes any opportunity for personal accountability, responsibility and growth. It doesn’t take very long before the concept of changing anything about yourself becomes offensive, because everything is out of your control. Your pain, your struggles, your sin, all of these things are just who you are.  

This is not who you are and this is not who you were made to be. We have all been the victim of someone else’s sinful acts, but we have all also victimized countless others through our own sins. In order for us to heal from our pasts, we have to acknowledge it wholly and in truth. Viewing our lives through the lens of truth, from God’s perspective rather than our own, we will first be driven to repentance, owning our faults and receiving His forgiveness and grace. Then, the transformation begins to happen. As we begin this relationship with God, the Holy Spirit will begin to make us aware of the areas of sin in our lives and empower us with the ability to change them. Oftentimes, He does this by using the pains, the trials, the struggles that we go through to teach us about who He truly is and who we truly are in light of Him. This is how He transforms us into His image which, in turn, is how we are meant to reflect and image God to the world around us. There are no victims in the Kingdom of Heaven, because even our sufferings are used by God to make us who are meant to be. I will close today’s video with a quote from Phillips Brooks: 

“O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God"