Guess who's back!

Hey, everyone!

I’m coming back to my blog after a hiatus of about a month or so. There are a few reasons I took a break. Some fun family stuff was going on, and I wanted to focus on that. My brother and his wife had a lovely pandemic wedding at the end of May, and I am so excited for them as they begin this stage of their life together!

Another reason is that I haven’t really been on Facebook much, which is where I post the link to my blog. I decided to delete the app in June to take a little break, and then the world shifted again. And in the midst of everything, my voice was and is not the voice that needed to be heard. There are other voices that deserved a chance to be heard—not that I think my voice overshadows those voice on a normal day. That would be stretching it just a bit. It just didn’t seem respectful, in my opinion, for me to be posting blog entries about the coffee I’m drinking or the books I’m reading when there are more important things people should be reading and educating themselves on right now.

On that note, I am going to make the following statement, with a disclaimer here. I am nowhere near conceited enough to believe that sharing my opinion is going to change your opinion. I don’t have that kind of power, and if you think you have that kind of power, then you should be using it for good and not evil. But since I have no control over who tells my story when I’m gone, I think it is important to say the following. I base my life around a certain belief system {it’s about to get semi-religious here, but I promise I’m not preaching at you}, and one of the most important tenets—actually, the most important—is the concept of love. Love God and love your neighbor. That means all of your neighbors. That means the neighbors that are not neighbors in the physical sense but the global sense. That means neighbors who have different beliefs than you and look different than you and have different opinions than you do. Love everyone—full stop. Notice it doesn’t say “agree with everyone” or “attack people who disagree with you.” It just says to love people.

And in the midst of all of the change that needs to happen, globally and nationally and locally, whatever those changes look like, I was finding myself getting very discouraged. There is so much that needs to change—how do you do it? I’m a fixer, and I like to fix things. I like to have a solid plan and go from there. How does this massive change happen, when we finally get people to look past differences—differences that we as humans have given power, by the way—and love each other? Because I have seen a lot of ugly in the last month or so. Ugly involving the pandemic and people’s beliefs and the need to belittle other people for their beliefs. Ugly involving race and ignorance about race and the unwillingness to educate oneself on the issues or to interact with each other in a non-ugly manner. Ugly involving my profession {this one’s a bit raw}, and it is beyond overwhelming. WHERE DO YOU EVEN START?

Well, guess what? My belief system has a starting point. I have had this Bible verse put before my eyes twice very recently, and that doesn’t seem like a coincidence. And when you say something crazy like, “Yeah, but is it a coincidence? Really, Kaitlin? I mean, like, if you’re looking at the Bible, isn’t it probably likely for this to happen?”, remember that there are 31,102 verses in the Bible. THIRTY-ONE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED TWO. And this one verse has popped up twice in very different scenarios. The first time was in a virtual study I was doing that was led by the Reverend Dr. Bernice A. King.

Hang on. Did you say Dr. King? Yes, I did. And yes, she is his daughter.

The second time was as I was scrolling through Pinterest. I am not a scholar of Jewish history, but from my brief internet research, this is ascribed to Rabbi Tarfon, who lived and worked between the year 70 and 135. NEARLY 2000 YEARS AGO, almost. Both of these religious scholars quoted Micah 6:8, which says, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Rabbi Tarfon added this:  “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. YOU ARE NOT OBLIGATED TO COMPLETE THE WORK, but neither are you free to abandon it.” {emphasis added by me}.

This gives me some hope. As a problem solver, I want to solve the problem, but maybe that isn’t my job. Maybe my job is just to help build a foundation by listening and educating myself. I’m certainly trying. It isn’t weak to rethink opinions and beliefs that you have. It isn’t unpatriotic to aspire for your country to grow and live up to its potential. It isn’t disrespectful to question the way things are.

And I think we can all do a little bit of a better job of this. I am not saying that you need to do a 180-shift on your way of thinking. But maybe you could start being more just. Instead of immediately accusing someone of something based on a tweet or a Facebook post and calling them names and belittling them, you could scroll on past! I know, it’s a crazy concept. Instead of getting riled up, you could try looking at things from someone else’s perspective—what makes them think or feel that way, and why does it upset you?

Maybe you could start loving mercy. Forgive people for things. Educate yourself, instead of just trusting the links people share on Facebook—or the news, because let’s be real, ALL of it is biased in one direction or another. Try interacting with people in a more compassionate way.

And maybe, just maybe, you could start walking a little more humbly. As I said at the beginning, I do not think that telling people my opinion is going to change people’s minds. I highly doubt there is anyone reading this who is now going to say, “Okay, so Kaitlin said that I should be kinder and listen to people and be forgiving, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do now, because she is so influential in my life that I just blindly do what she says.” Ummm, nope! And do you really think that commenting on someone’s tweet telling them they’re racist or homophobic or a bleeding-heart liberal is going to change their opinion? Are they suddenly going to drop their phone and say, “OMG, you’re so right! Radical change, here I come!”

Because if you do believe that, then you need some humility, friend. Maybe not some, but like a lot of humility. There are seven billion people on this planet, and it’s the only planet we’ve got. It isn’t like we can go to another one and avoid each other. We’ve got to work and live together. {Side note on the planet:  I’ve obviously seen a lot of posts and articles where people are stating that the whole pandemic is a conspiracy, blah blah blah. Well, here’s what I have to say on that…if it was, then I sincerely hope it was started by environmental scientists, because during the time we were all quarantined, Mother Earth was doing pretty darn good without our interference. And that is all I’m going to say about that}.

Anyway, if you’ve gotten this far in this very long post, congratulations! I have a bunch of post ideas that have nothing to do with anything controversial {unless you have very strong opinions on knitted items or movies based on books}, but I felt that it would be irresponsible to begin blogging again without acknowledging the way things have changed since my last post. I am going to make one small request:  if you find yourself really disagreeing with what I have said, then I would much rather have a conversation with you about it than read some mean comment you left on my post. This would be an excellent time to practice scrolling right on past something!

And stay gold, my friends!