The Difference in Your Definition of Good.
It starts out so innocently. You know what you feel to be right. Maybe not why you know it yet, but it’s there. This certainty, this absolute knowledge. You don’t question it because it feels so good to be this sure, this correct that it lights you on fire.
Without question, without hesitation, you move forward, with the answers that you need, wrapped in the sustaining belief that you what you are doing is the one thing that gives you the permission to do whatever you think needs to be done.
Fear those who do good without reference to the truths of others.
There’s nothing more destructive in this world than those who feel like they have the force of goodness, or of righteousness behind them.
From the idealist who sees no ideology other than their own, to the believer who launches armies in the surety of their faith, this world has suffered more death and destruction, more pain and persecution, more hatred and horror than anyone could have imagined, from those who thought that the perpetration of their power was backed by the rightness of their ego.
And it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
From politics to religion, from nations to families, the belief in our own goodness, our own infallible reason, leads us to the dismissal and the disavowal of those who disagree, cocooning ourselves in the enveloping fantasy of being in right in a universe that seems so full of wrong.
The more we harden our hearts against the opinions of others, the further we manifest the madness of the ages, proving to those around us that they are right, and we are wrong.
Go back and read that last sentence again please. I need you to understand it well.
Because the times of peace that we have enjoyed for the last few years are in desperate danger of becoming nothing more than a fantasy of a bygone time, a relic of melancholic remembrance lost in the darkness of a crushing confusion where cruelty, conviction and chaos have overwhelmed the strains of listening, loving and laughing together.
Unless we turn back the tide together, and weld together a peace borne out of a unity not of belief, but of life, a partnership not of ideas, but of respect, a willingness to understand before being understood.
We have to stop asking others to live our truths, and respect that they have their own.
Not an easy thing I grant you, but nothing worthwhile ever is. Respecting the truths of other requires us to dig deep with our souls and tap into that wellspring of humility than is a part of our humanity, allowing it to wash away our differences in an outpouring of love and kindness, desiring for those who are different what we most desire for ourselves.
Peace, love and understanding.
Because in all my years, (and it’s not just the years, but the mileage that counts) I’ve never seen peace created through shouting, happiness through hating, nor love through misunderstanding.
If we truly want to find peace in the world around us, it has to start within us, reaching out to enveil and encompass all those around us.
We have to find a better way to live with one another.
If we are to keep living at all.
(If this has moved you today, I ask that you share this post with any and all who you think could use to hear this message.)
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings