Bridging the Gap
“You must learn to live on fault lines.”― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
For Loving When Differences Divide Us
“This is a hard one.
How do I begin to connect
with someone so different from me?
How do I bridge this gap?
It feels wrong, like the beliefs I abhor.
Blessed are we who want included
in the wild and beautiful experiment
to find a common humanity.
Who desire to come into the gap
that separates human from human,
to love the stranger—
especially the one we really don’t understand
and secretly want to set straight.
Blessed are those standing in the gap,
In what can’t be understood.
To actively work on disproving
our own intuitions about another,
to begin to see what they see.
Blessed are we, swimming upstream
against the current of human frailty,
fears and emotions,
and willing to be wrong.
To reconsider.
And hold to our integrity
with kindness.
Desiring to map it out
and play the course,
instead of the one we made up.
And to discover that humility
is what makes change possible.
Grace is never neutral.
It works backwards and forwards in time,
conspiring to make wrong right.”
– Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie, The Lives We Actually Have
To ask and listen
To consider and reconsider
To learn and grow
To choose kindness over righteousness
To offer grace and receive it too
To agree to disagree
To walk in shared humanity
Light breaking through the clouds
Less judging, more loving
Hard, good work
Go first.
“Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”— Marcus Aurelias
