Imagine a sinister hitman walking up to this little girl and brutally punching her right in the gut!
Well, that's how I felt on January 6th. This little girl is me circa 1973 - first grade. When I was in the third grade, I involuntarily blurted out my feelings while riding with my dad past a large auto dealership. "Why do we keep making cars?!? What are we going to do with all these cars!?" In the 5th grade I invented a machine that would suck oil out of the ground through one side of its "straw" and smash trash down into the emptied "oil hole" through the other side of the straw. This idea came after perusing a Weekly Reader and discovering our advancing abilities to recycle metal. These things deeply concerned me. I never wore shoes, never combed the back of my hair, and I spent an inordinate amount of time hanging out under my bed in the purple haze cast by sunlight seeping through a red and blue bed skirt.
I was a passionate little kid full of hope despite the fact that I could barely breathe due to severe childhood asthma, which for the longest time I thought was the cause of these plagued puffy eyes. I learned later that these little flesh devils manifest more typically as a result of fear that comes in trying to survive the stress of keeping up with the pace of life on a lack of oxygen and therefore emotional energy, coupled with an increasing need to be heard on the matter. But still, I carried myself as if I were convinced I would soon prevail!
In the seventh grade, the principal called me into his office to explain to me that when they poked us off into the gym and made us take those fill-in-the-circles tests, I scored in the top ten percent of the nation. "Not the state, not the school, Jill, the nation." he said. So, he wanted to understand why my daily grades were so bad. I wanted to say, "Have you seen my room? I don't know where my bed is much less my homework. But hey, if you're going to imprison me in the gym for a day, I'm going to occupy my mind and engage."
As I watched the events of January 6th unfold, my gut feelings and thoughts were, "Okay wait. This has got to stop! All of this! It has to stop right here and right now." It matters not what anyone thinks about how or why these events took place. It only matters to me that the entire political modus operandi be changed - be transformed and, with the desperately needed help of God, we must keep working to transform it.
So, I know and am very familiar with the need to do your homework with the wind knocked out of you, and how failing to find the energy to do so is more costly than you can calculate. At the Christmas break of my senior year of high school, a report card revealed that I would not graduate if I did not bring my grade point average to a certain height. I aced my two save-the-hardest-for-last classes, which oddly enough happened to be Government and Free Enterprise. After I graduated, I had a flood of conviction about wasting twelve years of free education. I became mortified by this and I quickly turned into somewhat of an obsessive researcher in trying to catch up. To this day, I don't ever feel caught up.
But in this case, following the events of January 6th, 2021, I believe I must find the energy, even with the wind knocked out of me, to do my homework and then let my voice, at all risk, rise up! I believe I need to zoom in until I can see the dot matrix that makes up the whole of who I am and what I believe as an individual citizen of this country and then convene with others willing to do the same. I am completely convinced that this country will never be transformed without us - without our voices. I am equally completely convinced that there is a way for our voices to be heard and that the voice of the commoners does indeed possess the power to transform this nation. Where I'm convinced I've already done my homework on a matter, I must humble myself and dig deeper, ask God to give me greater wisdom and insight, formulate a personal plan from those insights, and put that plan into action. My one and only question is, "God what would you have me do in all this - plant a garden? shut my mouth? start a movement? wait it out? what? What would You have me do? I've been prayerfully binge-researching again and will continue until I am convinced I know the answer to that question.
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