Gratitude 43

I'm grateful that I do not have to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders.  That isn't my job.  This isn't the same as not caring.  Rather it is knowing how far to care without harming myself in the process.  This is especially important when you work with vulnerable adults.  Empathy, and lots of it, is needed to be able to do this job well, but it can't swallow you alive or you are not going to do it well.  This goes with living downtown, in a rundown area where there are homeless, beggars and people with addictions (often all the same person) at my doorstep.  Likewise the tenants in my building, some who have, and still, suffer dreadfully, mentally, physically or both. 

Likewise, I refuse to be defeated by our record homelessness crisis, or the incompetent boneheads we elect who show their incompetence day after day in their fecklessness for dealing with our housing crisis.  I will not be cowed by the menace of President Dump in the Whitehouse, nor by that fat little douchebag in North Korea, nor the threat of Marine Le Pen winning the French election.  I will not be frightened about climate change.

I am going to continue to care about all these things.  Where I am able to do something, I will do it, even if it's just writing something in this blog.  I will do it, if it just means performing one act of kindness to a stranger.  I will do it, if the only resource available is God, and so I will pray for those people, knowing that God can do more than I can, that he knows them better than I know them, and that it is really my task to be Aaron and God's task to be God.

Yes, we are also part of his work in the way we treat one another.  But we also have to know and respect our limits.  We can protect our vulnerable beating heart without hardening it.  All the sorrow and heartache in the world is not going to prevent me from enjoying a walk, a garden, a flower, a bird, a cat, or a friendly human.  Nothing is going to taint for me the pure sweetness of the spring air.  And nothing in this world is going to prevent me from laughing, especially at myself.

There is practically nothing we can do to change the world.  We can be instruments in our own healing and the healing of others, but we first have to pull our heads out of the fear and panic that results when empathy turns into a devouring monster.  We don`t kill it, we don`t drive it away, neither do we lock it in a cage.  We learn to live with it, to work with it.  We learn to respect and know our limits and we also gain enough love to step bravely beyond our limits to be the people we are called to be.

And when we are able to differentiate between empathy and fear, we will already know we are ready to step out, because we will have already stepped out beyond our limits.