March 28th, 2023
It’s weird, because yesterday’s school shooting was supposed to be a heavy day for our country, but nearly every day is heavy with the same weight, like a wet blanket at the bottom of a swimming pool, so yesterday was just a normal day.
This is our normal.
I wrote an essay about grief on Sunday in which I used the powerful phrase “Maybe I’m wrong.”
What if we all embraced those words? Every morning when we wake up, what if we considered something we “knew” to be true, and we asked ourselves if there was a possibility that we were wrong about it.
Maybe I’m wrong about guns.
Maybe I’m wrong to attack people just because I don’t understand them.
Maybe I’m wrong to not try to understand different ways of life.
Maybe I’m wrong to want to censor other voices, and burn other’s words.
Maybe I’m wrong over wanting to control other human lives.
Maybe I’m wrong to seek out false information that only confirms my own biases.
Maybe I’m wrong in how I treat and speak to certain people.
Maybe I’m wrong to ignore how Jesus brilliantly teaches us how to care for others.
Maybe I’m wrong to outright ignore Jesus.
Maybe I’m wrong in how I think we are protecting our children and the most vulnerable people in our country.
Maybe I’m wrong in thinking I know everything. Maybe I can learn.
We can’t fix anything if we don’t admit that something is broken, and that something, sometimes, is the way we think.
As soon as you question yourself, you free yourself; you are now open to explore every avenue, to look down streets you previously avoided.
This is scary. I freaking know. I had to ask myself, countless times over my life, “Maybe I’m wrong and I can’t drink like everybody else. Maybe I’m wrong and all I do is hurt people.”
Sometimes this exercise strengthens what you feel and know, and that can be a great thing, too. When you really hold your beliefs up to the light, and then pick at them with extreme scrunity, you get to see what they’re made of, and how strong its parts are.
What happened yesterday shouldn’t be normal. We shouldn’t lose count of days like these.
But, you know… maybe I’m wrong.
The Den 