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I’m Boycotting Fear

You can boycott Target if you want to, friend. 

I’m not going to try and change your mind anymore.

I’m not going to argue with you.

As for me, I’m boycotting something else.

I’m boycotting fear.

I am also emphatically saying “no.”

I am saying no to manufactured bathroom battles that distract me from the work of loving people, of encouraging them, of seeing them; the work of compassion and equality to which I am called.

I am saying no to the politics of fear that imagine a thousand terrors lurking in restrooms and around corners, to perpetuate the necessary narrative of a sky that is always falling.

I am saying no to cheap religion that needs an ever-encroaching enemy in order to give itself life and to stimulate zeal and to make itself feel valid.

I am saying no to the faith of least resistance, that eschews the difficult and the complex conversations, in favor of stark black and white caricatures of the righteous and the wicked, of the inside and outside.

I am saying no to the myths that we are at war with one another, that we are all that different, that there are any real sides to take that fully separate us.

I am saying no to the lie that our women and children are in danger, and that the only way to protect them is to damage someone else.

I am saying no to “religious liberty” that makes someone else less free. 

I am saying no to an impotent spirituality that is so easy threatened by people and circumstance, that it always requires violent defense.

I am saying no to a weaponized, politicized Christianity that has so very little regard or need for the compassionate, merciful ways of Jesus anymore.

I am a person of deep faith, saying “yes” to what my faith is supposed to be a yes to.

It’s a yes to loving people as I desire to be loved.

It’s a yes to healing more wounds than I inflict. 

It’s a yes to yielding to the needs of others before my own.

It’s a yes to making the world more decent because of my presence.

It’s a yes to honoring the inherent worth of every person I share this space with.

It’s a yes to moving to the margins to meet people there who are unheard and unseen and hurting.

It’s a yes to sharing whatever I have been blessed with; whether ease or comfort or opportunity or privilege.

It’s a yes to defaulting to humility instead of arrogance with those who oppose me.

It’s a yes to building bridges and not walls between people.

It’s a yes to laying down being right if it makes me more loving. 

It’s a yes to remembering the humanity of people, even when I disagree with them. 

It’s a yes to being louder about the beauty I see out there than about the ugliness. 

It’s a yes to finding the goodness in the world and giving it a boost wherever I can.

And it’s a yes to recognizing that a faith without love—isn’t worth squat.

I am doing my best in these days to abstain from all that is unloving and bitter and divisive.

So you can choose not to shop somewhere if you deem that a worthy path.

You can choose to withhold or withdraw or condemn as a matter of conscience.

I am choosing a different path.

I am targeting bigotry.

I am boycotting fear and I’m putting all my money down on Love.

That is what my faith requires of me.

That’s the greatest stand worth taking.

It’s the gutsiest choice I can make.

It’s the boldest move there is.

And it’s far stronger than fear.

I’m told that love casts fear out;

of my heart,

of the Church,

and even of the bathroom.

I’m going to believe that.

 

 

 

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