What is Mine?
My new mantra seems to be “What is mine?” When I disagree with others, when I feel contempt, when anger bubbles up, when another irritates me with irrationality, I have been practicing taking a pause and asking myself, “What is mine here?” The veil over my eyes has been peeled back for me to see that the only way to dig deeper into truth, is to weed out the falsehood in my own life, instead of looking to correct the lens of the world.
Often, it’s hard to know that we aren’t seeing clearly until the truth pops up in unavoidable ways. The first time I got glasses I sincerely thought that I didn’t need them. I had eye strain and headaches but my vision seemed completely fine. When I placed those frames onto my face and the world instantly took a new shape and my vision became clear, I realized that the truth I had been experiencing was simply error that I had grown comfortable with.
How many ways are we applying this tendency to be right - to have truth with a capital T - when really what has been proven time and again is that we have truth, lowercase t? This isn’t to say that truth is relative or even changing. With age comes a deepening of experience; more contextualization. Vision expands, understanding becomes more complete. So, it’s not the truth that changes, but our perspective and posture towards it.
The mode of faith that has been taught in the modern church, and that we need to be greatly suspicious of, is to automatically find ourselves to be the good guy in every story. Are you ever the doubter? The one yielding the sword or the stone of self-righteousness? Are you ever the unfaithful, the Pharisee, or the sinner? If we would dare to take the holy text and turn it inward and allow it to expose all of the ways that we support the very power structures that are at odds with good and sound doctrine, than we could have a complete reimagination of discipleship and our faith would look a lot more like love.
May we look inside of ourselves and challenge what we call the truth. May we have a divine correction in how we see those that we find hard to love. May we see the force of grace that stands around us as the power structures that need to come down, do. May we begin to let others have their own journey, while we become more comfortable asking ourselves, “What is mine here?”