{"id":16892,"date":"2018-06-15T07:16:01","date_gmt":"2018-06-15T11:16:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=16892"},"modified":"2018-06-15T09:57:54","modified_gmt":"2018-06-15T13:57:54","slug":"wounded-healers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=16892","title":{"rendered":"Wounded Healers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sL-mF_FwPnI\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Wounded Healers<\/strong><br \/>\nFriday, June 15, 2018<\/p>\n<p>Bryan Stevenson (b. 1959) is a lawyer, social justice activist, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. [1] In his book Just Mercy, Stevenson describes how being in touch with our own humanity and need for mercy helps give us the compassion needed for restorative justice. He is a real contemporary hero for many of us at the Center for Action and Contemplation.<\/p>\n<p>My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn\u2019t just illuminate the brokenness of others; in moments of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can\u2019t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. . . .<\/p>\n<p>I guess I\u2019d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we\u2019re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we\u2019re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.<\/p>\n<p>We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. . . .<\/p>\n<p>So many of us have become afraid and angry. We\u2019ve become so fearful and vengeful that we\u2019ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak\u2014not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we\u2019ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we\u2019ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we\u2019ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We\u2019ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible.<\/p>\n<p>But simply punishing the broken\u2014walking away from them or hiding them from sight\u2014only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity. . . .<\/p>\n<p>Embracing our brokenness creates a need for mercy. . . . I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn\u2019t want to kill the broken among us who have killed others. Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized. . . . We could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.<\/p>\n<p> JUNE 15<br \/>\nWHEN YOU APPROACH ME<br \/>\nin stillness and in trust, you are strengthened. You need a buffer zone of silence around you in order to focus on things that are unseen. Since I am invisible, you must not let your senses dominate your thinking. The curse of this age is overstimulation of the senses, which blocks out awareness of the unseen world. The tangible world still reflects My Glory to those who have eyes that see and ears that hear. Spending time alone with Me is the best way to develop seeing eyes and hearing ears. The goal is to be aware of unseen things even as you live out your life in the visible world. <\/p>\n<p>So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. \u20142 CORINTHIANS 4:18 <\/p>\n<p>And they were calling to one another: \u201cHoly, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.\u201d \u2014ISAIAH 6:3 <\/p>\n<p>Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things from Your law. \u2014PSALM 119:18 NKJV <\/p>\n<p>I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope. \u2014PSALM 130:5<\/p>\n<p>Young, Sarah. Jesus Calling<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wounded Healers Friday, June 15, 2018 Bryan Stevenson (b. 1959) is a lawyer, social justice activist, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. [1] In his book Just Mercy, Stevenson describes how being in touch with our own humanity and need for mercy helps [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16892"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16892"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16896,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16892\/revisions\/16896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}