Broken

But we're not irrational, are we? 

That's the question when it comes to hate. This week, we've already seen how hate is always based on a lie, always meant to protect us from some truth that we are not ready or not willing to face. We've also seen how hate makes our world smaller...or makes us seek to make someone else's world smaller; it forces us to draw lines so that there is always an us, always a them, and never a shared space between us. 

It's exhausting. 

And it seems perfectly rational, when hate is the fuel; and it seems perfectly irrational when we understand that the hate itself is based on a lie. 

The truth is...it's not about rationality at all. Hate is neither rational nor irrational. 

It's brokenness. 

Underneath every hateful soul, no matter the arrogance or bravado or self-righteousness or obstinance or insistence or whatever - underneath every single hateful soul...is a wounded one. And that's what we really have to address.

We have to address the truths about brokenness and fallenness in this world, the truths that are too heavy and too raw for our fragile souls to handle and that turn us toward hate in the first place. We have to address the things that we are so unwilling to address, the things that drive us to create alternative narratives just so that we can avoid them. We have to address that internal tendency that we have to create a them in all of the places where there ought to be a very solid we - for we are all broken and we are all touched by brokenness and we are all fallen and we all have the very same realities to face, whether we want to or not. 

Whenever I encounter hate in the world, it doesn't make me indignant. It doesn't make me angry. It doesn't make me form a negative opinion of someone who is hateful, no matter how much venom is spewing out of their mouth. No matter how much scorn fills their eyes. No matter how much, even, they hate someone like me. Or maybe specifically me. (Yes, there are persons in this world who do hate me, with a venom that would make the hair on the back of your neck bristle.) 

No. When I encounter hate, even personal hate, it makes me...sad. It makes me grieve. It makes me reflect on all of the hard truths that exist in this world and what it does to a tender heart to try to hold them all. What it does to a human being to try to cope with a world that is not as it should be, with selves that are not as they should be, with others that are not as they should be. 

I think about the lies that make us turn to hate, and I wonder which one it was that fueled this hate. And I dream about what truth - real truth, a truth humbly embraced or at least quietly confessed - could do. I dream about what this world would be like if we weren't so afraid of its dark places all the time and instead, stood in the light and the grace and the mercy that we claim that we know we have. 

See, that's the gift of faith. One of them, anyway. When you know who God really is, when you understand what He's doing here and with what amazing love He loves you, you don't have to be afraid of the truths that so easily become lies that so easily become hate. You can just...accept them. That doesn't mean you don't work against them. It doesn't mean you resign yourself that this is the way things have to be. It doesn't mean you give up on changing things. 

It means you just...embrace them instead of running from them. Pray for them instead of ignoring them. Put them in their proper place in the real narrative in Creation instead of feeling the need to craft false narratives all around them. 

Hate is brokenness, but truth is healing. 

But then...that is also the rub....